


Can't Starve Us Out, Can't Make Us Run

by UneJolieOrdure



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Best Friends, Character Death, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Dialect, Domestic Violence, Drug Use, Explicit Language, F/F, F/M, Gun Violence, Hate Crimes, Hillbillies, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Motorcycles, Multi, Murder, Overdosing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prom, Religious Fanaticism, Sexual Content, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-09-20 20:08:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 41,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9511151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UneJolieOrdure/pseuds/UneJolieOrdure
Summary: Winter Holler is right on the border between West Virginia and Kentucky. Poor and isolated, its inhabitants do what they have to for survival. Between them, West Virginia's Ned Stark and Kentucky's own Bob Baratheon have built up a sweeping, lucrative methamphetamine empire from nothing, but it could be destined to fall with its founders if their sons don't get their heads out of their asses. A couple of modern-day Romeo-Juliet romances rise and fall. Theon Greyjoy loses some teeth and some dignity. Sansa knows better than to get in a pickup with a dirty cop. Robb thinks he can be the antihero of this story after all.Otherwise known as "the hillbilly AU literally nobody asked me to write."





	1. Down-Home American Kids

**Author's Note:**

> I'm operating with a totally show-based knowledge of canon here; because of a condition, I can't really read novels, let alone massive ones. I'm restricted to audiobooks, and let's just say I haven't quite found the time or the stamina for the jillions of hours it's going to take to listen to the books. Feel free to comment! I've been reading and writing fanfiction for years, but this is the first time in a long time I've posted anything, and the first time I've posted here. Roast me. I need it. 
> 
> The situations/settings in this fic are loosely based on my own Appalachian upbringing, though I did add quite a bit more meth for entertainment's sake a la "Winter's Bone." This first chapter is really just a lot of boring exposition. I'll probably add more tags as I go. I have a few more chapters pre-written, but after that I'll be flying by the seat of my pants. Thanks for reading!

On the day that Ned Stark went down to Kentucky to die, this was the state of affairs in his household: he had six children, a loving wife, a crumbling two-story farmhouse in West Virginia, a crystal meth empire, and half a tin of chewing tobacco in his back pocket—his only personal vice. 

His flip-phone had been buzzing all day: calls from Bob, his partner down south, who was in deep, deep shit. The man who had taught them both how to wheel and deal, everybody’s favorite Great Uncle Jon, had died in the night, foul play suspected. The loosely congregated group of meth-peddling hillbillies was no Mexican cartel, but the game still had rules. Bob seemed to have trouble understanding that. He never saw the trouble coming, not when he had married his snake of a wife, not when half the state had turned against him, and certainly not now.

Robb, Ned’s eldest, had been named for old Bob, and he was similarly guileless. A big, thick-armed, floppy-haired, golden-retriever-type twenty-something who had never strayed far from his family home and his father’s instruction, Robb had never been disliked and had never done any disliking. He was the exact opposite of his brother, who was only younger by one year. Dark-haired, sullen, quiet, and quick to fight, he had been generally detested among the teenage boys and generally adored among the teenage girls. Nobody about town was actually sure where Jon had come from—he was no son of Cat Stark’s, that much was obvious—but they did know that as soon as he had turned eighteen, he had been sent packing straight to the Army recruiter’s office. Sansa was next, a typical teenage girl who was a lot smarter than she looked in her plastic bracelets and her jeans with bedazzles on the ass. She was going out with Joff, Bob’s eldest son, a Justin-Bieber-looking twat who had never gotten past second base with her or anyone else. Then Arya, a scrappy little tomboy, dirty and defiant.

The doctor had advised Cat Stark to stop having babies after Arya had been born. It had been a difficult delivery; the baby had come early, had been small, had needed oxygen. Cat was getting old, even then. Her body had given its all to her first three. But she was devout; she didn’t believe in birth control. Every child was a gift from God—if they had special needs, then that was His test for her, and her place in heaven would be all the more heavenly for it. Sure enough, her next child, Brandon, had been born with spina bifida. He was wheel-chair bound, and while the state payed for the majority of his expenses, the boy weighed heavily on the family's conscience and their checkbook alike. Ricky was the youngest, a miraculously healthy child, born just before Cat's merciful descent into menopause. 

Robb Stark and Joff Baratheon were poised to inherit two halves of Appalachia’s biggest crank operation, and neither of them had any idea what that entailed. Ned barely even knew what it entailed. He had always busied himself with the day-to-day minutiae while Bob worried about the grandstanding, the show-making, the fear-inspiring. He had always been better at spraying people with bullets and Ned had always been better at hacking deals and making sure there was actually shit out there on the streets for them to sell. With Uncle Jon dead, there was no way that Bob could hold Kentucky all on his own, not with his wily brother-in-law Jaime and his sneaky father-in-law poking around, veritably spitting on Uncle Jon's grave.

That day, Arya and Ricky had found a Real Big Turtle in the ditch in front of their house and were poking at it with a couple of sticks, screaming in delight every time it moved. Sansa was on her way down the yard at her mother’s behest to identify whether or not it was a snapping turtle when Ned came marching out of the house with his shotgun in hand, trailed closely by Robb and his ever-present best friend, Theon. 

“If it’s a snapper it’ll bit your fingers clean off!” she hollered at her siblings. “Leave it alone!” The two children, however, had completely lost interest in the cranky old turtle and were racing headlong toward their father.

“Daddy, where you goin’ with your shotgun?”

“Daddy, can I come?” Sansa stood there staring at the muddy amphibian, the size of a dinner plate, moving painstakingly along the drainage ditch on its wrinkled legs before she turned around, her skinny white arms folded over her push-up bra. She had a bad feeling about all this business. That, and she didn’t like it when her father got too close to her boyfriend, geographically-speaking. She didn't like it when they _talked._

“No, you can’t come,” Ned Stark was saying, shooting some brown chew spit out the side of his mouth. “We’ll be back tomorrow. Uncle Bob just needs a hand down in Kentucky. You two take care of Sansa and your mother."

“I want to come to Kentucky!” Brandon called from inside. “Daddy, I wanna come!”

“Ain’t nobody comin’ to Kentucky!” Ned Stark barked back, losing patience. “Boys, get in the truck.” Cat Stark, the matriarch of the clan, appeared in the doorway, in her Sunday best as usual, a long skirt and a well-pressed blouse. Sansa hated her mother’s embarrassing Mormon clothing. Cat had been raised down-mountain in the LDS church; she had scandalized everyone by marrying out of the faith and moving up to the holler. Sansa had always hated that story, the sparkle-eyed devilishness with which her mother told it. Some fuckin’ scandal. 

“You bring my son back, Ned Stark,” she cautioned, drying a glass on a tattered dishcloth. She looked serene enough. The warning was habitual, fond, without expectation of any actual danger.

“I will, darlin’,” he promised, kissing her on her white-powdered cheek. He spit more chew. “Sansa, come over here and give your daddy a kiss.” She took her time picking her way across the muddy yard. She kissed her father’s prickly cheek, leaving a little smear of cherry lip-gloss behind. 

“See you tomorrow, daddy.”

“I’m gonna kick your boyfriend’s ass, Sansa,” Theon teased, cranking down the window so he could lean out and leer at her with his sharp joker's face. “Me and Robb are gonna duct-tape him to a wall.”

“Leave Joff alone,” she snapped. “Daddy, tell them to leave him alone.”

“Nobody’s gonna duct tape anybody else to a goddamn wall,” Ned promised, swatting Theon on the head, taking his keys out of his pocket. Sansa watched them bounce off down the rutted dirt road, absently-mindedly fingering the cell-phone in her pocket. Behind her, she would hear crashes and shouts from the house, the kids rough-housing. She dialed a number.

“Hey, Maggie. My daddy’s gone for the night. Come over. Yeah, you know mama, she’s gonna be Xanax-ed out by nine-thirty. We’re goin’ out.”

*

A Brief Introduction to Theon Greyjoy, Who Lives Over There by the Lake, and What He Does With His Free Time: 

Theon Greyjoy had been Robb Stark’s best friend since elementary school. He was generally known as a venereal-disease-carrying ladies’ man who did not know how to keep his mouth shut, when in reality he was a self-loathing, closeted homosexual with a burgeoning meth addiction who did not know how to keep his mouth shut. If you asked anyone in the holler, they would have pointed vaguely west and told you that he had been born _over there, by the lake_ to one of those white trash families that even other white trash families found too trashy to palate. Once upon a time, his daddy had given fly-fishing tours in the mountain rivers and run a quaint little bait-n-tackle shop, but after the death of his wife and his two eldest children, things had rapidly gone sour. The already-uneasy family unit had disintegrated, surrendered to alcoholism and violence. The bait-n-tackle store was still up and running, but since his sister Yara had run off to join the Navy, things weren’t looking so hot. If Theon wasn’t selling so much meth out of the back of the store, it probably would have gone under by now. He had never gotten around to taking down the Christmas lights that his father had put up in ’03, the last year they had been any kind of family at all. They had all burnt out by now, sagging and broken, but it was part of the rustic charm.

The drug-dealing and womanizing was no secret, but Theon did keep a few secrets, even from Robb. Once a month or so, he would disappear for a couple of weeks; everyone assumed that he was on some kind of bender fucking some kind of hot mess, which was, generally speaking, extremely accurate. 

About halfway between Ned Stark’s property and the lake was Roose Bolton’s trailer. A long-faced, crooked-toothed, sour son-of-a-bitch with plenty of illusions of grandeur, he could often be found in the cook-house rather than at home. He didn’t like to spend too much time with his son, whom he referred to only as “the boy,” and who gave him no end of grief. There was a tall chain-link fence around the yard, containing about ten-odd mean-looking dogs. There were some good, strong-bred hunting dogs, blue-tick coonhounds and pointers, but also a good mix of mutts that had been rescued from the side of the road, muscular, flat-headed pit-bulls, little scrappy terriers, one massive, shaggy black monster with only one eye. Mismatched as they were, they all loved their master, Roose’s boy Ramsay, who was the type of young man Cat Stark might generously describe as “not quite right” in that back-handed sympathetic way of hers.

Ramsay’s pastimes included hunting out-of-season game, breaking people’s kneecaps with a Louisville Slugger, selling crank in bulk out of the back of his truck, and trying and failing to come to terms with decades of psychological trauma at the hands of his father. He was well-known in the holler for being a.) bat-shit fuckin' crazy and b.) a connoisseur of the meth-induced fuck-a-thon. You couldn’t meth-binge too often, not every weekend. Not even every-other-weekend. Once a month, maybe. Ramsay sure as fuck wasn’t looking to become one of those oily, meth-mouthed zombie-freaks he sold to. He had met Theon Greyjoy (you know, the one who lives over there, by the lake, try to keep up,) through the Starks, who partnered very closely with his father, and not long after, the two of them had started buying a lot of rolls of tinfoil together at the Family Dollar. This might have seemed benign anywhere else, but in the holler, there was only one thing two twenty-somethings could be doing with tinfoil, and it had nothing to do with baked potatoes. 

Don't forget any of this. It's gonna be important later.

*

It was just after dawn the next day, a wood smoke, orange-Fanta sunrise, just a little bit spring-cold. Sansa was just sneaking back into the house, holding her high-heels to avoid making any noise. Her face felt stiff with a sticky combination of makeup, spit, tears, and sweat. It had been a typical night with Maggie Tyrell, her high-school best friend—they had been down at the muddin' pit, a former lake that the county had drained years before. They had spent the night pulling donuts in Joff's truck, drinking a nauseating combination of Coors Lite and some neon-colored wine coolers, surrounded by other bored teenagers doing the same. As usual, there had been a fight, some crying, and a lot of making up and declarations of never-ending friendship. Sansa had only had to spend a few minutes alone with her boyfriend, which was what she preferred, those days. He was getting nasty-mean, but she was too afraid to break up with him. He had a temper and his daddy had given him a gun for his birthday. She had just finished finessing the squeaky door open when Ned’s pickup truck skidded to a noisy stop outside of the house. Without a word, Theon stepped out, slammed his doors, and walked around to the back of the truck to help Robb, who had been riding in the bed with…

Sansa dropped her shoes and ran over, hissing, 

“What happened?” Robb waved his arm at her frantically, tears in his eyes. His white wifebeater was stuck to his chest with patches of browning blood.

“Go inside, Sansa,” he rasped. “I’ll be in soon.”

“Oh, God,” Sansa breathed shrilly. “Oh my God, daddy…” In the filthy, oil-smeared bed of the truck, Ned Stark’s body was laid out on Robb’s flannel, his skin a mushroom shade of blue-white, a gaping bullet wound turning the left side of his head into a grisly jigsaw. Everything was crusted with rusty flakes of blood. “Is he okay?”

“He’s dead, Sansa,” Theon said, putting his head on the girl’s shoulder. “I’m real sorry.” The girl was nudged off aside as the men hefted the body between them and began to lug it into the house. She did the only thing she knew how to do: she said the Lord’s Prayer as she trailed behind them, bare-footed and crying black mascara and glitter. She lingered outside of the open door even after they’d gone in until she heard her mother shrieking, until she heard Arya and Ricky start to wail, until she heard the foreign sound of Robb’s deep, chesty sobs. Then she sat down with her back against the wall and put her head between her knees and told God that she was sorry for doing all those things she had done, for drinking and driving, for sneaking out, for being mean to her sister, for smoking weed, for making fun of her mother, for letting Joff touch her boobs, for letting him finger her that one time, for wearing her shorts too short. She promised that she’d cut it out and be a good Christian if only he’d take the bullet back.


	2. Becoming Acquainted With Your Second Amendment Rights/The Buckle-End of the Belt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftershocks of Ned's murder rock everybody. Sansa gets her own personal bodyguard. Theon and Ramsay are the opposite of #goals, unless your standards are really, really low. Robb doesn't know what the fuck he's doing (as usual.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for all the positive feedback! It really means a lot to me. I hope I can keep fulfilling/exceeding your expectations! I kind of smashed the next two chapters I had written together to make one long Frankenchapter. I hope it's not too long.

Some Quick Facts About Sandor Clegane:

\+ He didn’t like to be called “Sandy,” but everyone called him Sandy anyway. You would think that people could restrain themselves from calling a guy who was roughly the size and shape of a grizzly bear something he didn’t want to be called, but this was not the case.

\+ Sandor Clegane had gotten a terrible tattoo of a dog on his left shoulder at the tender age of sixteen. It was supposed to be barking, but due to some unfortunate choices by the (extremely inebriated) artist, it looked like it was vomiting up its own teeth. Some people on the force called him “The Hound,” which he liked to think had something to do with his fantastic detective skills but was probably just them making fun of his abortion of a tattoo. 

\+ He did not like to be associated with his brother, Big Greg, with whom he unfortunately shared a profession. Greg was an idiot and a bully. He was responsible for Sandor’s ugly chick-repelling face. If accused of this, he would just say, “aw, man, I was like, seven, give me a fuckin’ break,” but Sandor suspected that Greg still took great pleasure in having been the one to burn his brother’s face half-off at a Boy Scouts campfire. 

\+ Despite their mutual dislike, Big Greg was Sandor’s only family, and they shared the inheritance that their parents had left them: a double-wide in Kentucky, two dumpy pick-ups, and a mean old goat named Apples. 

\+ Sandor Clegane had almost become a pastor, once. He didn’t like to talk about it.

\+ Being a regular old police officer did not pay nearly as much as being Old Man Lannister’s crooked cop did. All the extra money went in the "Leaving West Virginia” fund, which was almost substantial enough to amount to something. Big Greg did not know about this fund, and if Sandor had his way, he never would.

*

Things were coming unglued at the Stark house. Cat had created a soundless, bullet-proof cocoon around herself; she seemed incapable of moving, speaking too quickly, performing simple tasks. The kids turned their grief on each other; they spent all day fighting, flinging shoes, toys, and words at one another. Robb was never home—he was out trying to put out all the fires that their father had left behind. Sansa was constantly rediscovering just how shitty she was at being somebody's big sister. Her mother had always been more than happy to be a mother; Cat's eldest daughter had only had to hold the diaper bag, babysit occasionally, and relay her mother’s commands. But now she had found herself making lunches, putting Ricky’s socks on in the morning, making sure Arya brushed her teeth...she lost patience with it all so quickly. Their closest neighbor, an old woman everyone just called Nan, tried to help her, but she was slow and arthritic and hard of hearing and the strong-willed Stark children refused to listen to her. 

Ned hadn't been the only one to bite the bullet that night in Kentucky; Bob had also gotten himself capped, but Joff didn’t seem too torn up about his pa’s death. Bob had been a short-tempered alcoholic who had never held any qualms about making Swiss cheese out of people who got in his way, sure, but he had also been surprisingly kind and generous. Sansa hadn't hated him. She had liked his stories. When he got drunk, Uncle Bob had liked to tell the one about how he and Ned and ol' Jaime had conspired to get rid of the Targaryen family, who had been gunning people down for three hollers around, the innocent and the guilty alike. _"Pow! Right in the gut!"_ he would cackle, pantomiming getting get-shot. _"Old Man T never saw it fuckin' comin'. After that it was like shootin' fish in a...fish in a basket."_ The remaining children of the clan had been scooped up by social services and sent to Charleston. It had been up to Neddy and Bobby to figure out what to do with all those empty meth labs and all those sheds full of sawed-off shotguns. They hadn't exactly chosen wisely.

Despite Joff's seeming lack of grief, Sansa liked to pretend that they were mourning together. She liked to think that it might repair their relationship. She let him take her out to the woods one bright afternoon so that he could shoot cans off a stump while she sat with her legs dangling off the tailgate of the truck and half-watched. His stance was horrible. He had the sight screwed on wrong. He kept missing the beer cans he had set up in a line less than fifty feet away. Not one of them had moved in half an hour. Her bright orange ear plugs were starting to itch.

“You’re doin’ great, baby,” Sansa said without much enthusiasm, glancing at her phone. No texts. Maggie hadn’t exactly been understanding since Ned's death. She was the number one volunteer in the 4H Club, always making soup for seniors or knitting blankets for the poor, but when it came to actually helping her friends, she was selfish, impatient, and lukewarm. 

“Hey, Sansa, look," her boyfriend's nasal voice urged, muffled by the plugs. She did. He was pointing his gun at a little squirrel in the branch above the beer cans. Before she could say anything to dissuade him, he fired, and wouldn't you know it—Joff landed his first shot of the day. The little critter tumbled from the branch, a Pollock-esque explosion of red, white, and fur.

“Oh my God, Joff, why would you do that?” Sansa shrieked, ripping her earplugs out by their little cord.

“Because I can," he laughed, toeing at the fresh cadaver with his Timberland boot. "That was a damn good shot." He ambled over to the truck and set the shiny new gun down beside her. She scooted away, back, trying to get away from both him and his favorite plaything. 

"Doncha wanna give me a good-job kiss?" He leaned forward, puckering his lips obscenely. Sansa covered her own face, shaking her head. She herself didn't even know why she was so upset. She had seen plenty of things die. She had seen her father and her brothers and even little Arya take down plenty of game, but never just for sport, never just for the sake of seeing something smaller and dumber than you die. Joff grabbed her by the arm, wrenched her hand away from her face, and forced a slimy kiss on her anyway. He snatched her phone out of her lap and stuffed it into his back pocket. As soon as she jumped down to confront him, he was in the cab of the truck.

“You’re a fuckin’ tease, Sansa, you know that?” he sneered out the window, and with that, Joff peeled off with a shriek of tires. Sansa stood there for a moment staring dumbly at the truck's tail-lights and the dust it kicked up in its wake, her arm smarting, her mouth half-open, betrayed. Then she put her lank red hair up in a ponytail, squared her jaw, and started walking. It wasn't long before someone zipped past her in a Chevy and wolf-whistled out the window. She could hear them laughing. She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt up. It wasn’t much longer before a battered brown pick-up pulled up beside her; she kept her eyes averted, kept walking, her heart in her throat. She tried to remember what her father had taught her about self-defense. 

“Hey. I saw what he did. Get in the truck,” someone commanded; she heard them open the passenger side door for her, saw it out of the corner of her eye.

“Who the fuck are you?” she demanded sharply, if a little fearfully, finally turning to face the driver. He was older than her, maybe a little, maybe a lot—it was hard to tell. He might have been good-looking if it hadn’t been for the scar tissue that scrunched up his face and his terrible hair, too long, not combed. He was wearing a Harley Davidson t-shirt, but he didn’t look like he’d fit on a motorcycle. He barely fit in the driver’s seat of the truck.

“I’m a cop, little girl. Get in the truck.” He honked the horn impatiently; she jumped, but she wouldn’t crack. She had already promised herself that she wasn't going to crack.

“Like hell you are. I’ve seen you before. You hang around with Joff’s uncle and all them. I ain’t goin’ nowhere with you.” She wrapped her arms around herself, tight, and kept walking. His truck trawled along beside her slowly. 

“Welp, I’m drivin’ away on the count of three whether or not you’re in the damn truck.”

“Good. Go away.” She faced forward resolutely.

“One.”

Sansa snuck a glance over her shoulder. Even though it was only two in the afternoon, the woods looked extra dark already. It would take her hours and hours to walk all the way home.

“Two. You really wanna take your chances with them drunk yahoos up the road who was whistlin’ at you?”

She felt dumb panic creeping up her throat. On the count of three, Sansa jumped into the truck and slammed the door behind her. She felt queasy with relief and a new, different terror. She smashed herself up against the door, keeping one suspicious eye on her chauffeur.

“I wanna go home.” She sounded like a little girl and she hated herself for it. She had always longed to be older than she was.

“Fine. Which way?” He kept his eyes on the road. 

“I dunno.” That was when she was started to cry, great, hiccuping, dramatic sobs that all but turned her inside-out. Her rescuer/kidnapper sighed deeply, clearly regretting his good deed of the day already.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Alright. We’ll just go back into town.” It took Sansa a good five minutes to get herself under control, but once she had, an eerie, dead-calm came over her pallid face. She narrowed her weepy eyes at her companion. 

“Why were you out in the woods?” she asked warily, her voice thick with tears, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“Joff’s ma likes me to keep an eye on the little fucker.”

“You do everythin’ Joff’s ma asks you to do?” This was a stupid question. Sansa was just as afraid of Sissy Lannister as everybody else was. If the woman said jump, she jumped. Sissy’s cigarette-yellowed grimace gave her nightmares.

“She’s a friend.” She was not fooled. She knew that he knew that she knew what he was, what he did. How could she not? Her pa had been the one running it all. Nobody did anything just because they were _friends._

“Alright. What’s your name?” He grabbed something off the dashboard and flicked it across the seat at her. It was a police ID card. He hadn't been lying about that, at least. She read it over silently and then gave it back.

“I’m Sansa.”

“I know who you are, little girl.” A moment passed. “Too bad about your pa.” This set her spilling over into another round of tears; this time, mercifully, silent tears. She pulled the collar of her sweatshirt over her mouth to wipe her eyes, to hide her trembling lips.

“Were…were you there?” She wasn't afraid of anything anymore, she realized. All of the fear had been wrung out of her. Officer Sandor Clegane could get mad and murder her if he wanted to. 

“Was I where?”

“Were you there when they…shot him?”

“No,” he lied. She knew that he knew that she knew it.

“Do you know who did it?”

“No,” he lied again. “Your pa was playin’ a dangerous game, Sansa Stark. He had a shitload of enemies.”

“He was a good person.” She sat up a little straighter, suddenly defensive.

“That don’t mean much," Clegane chuckled, turning off of the wooded trail and onto the holler's main drag: pitted tar, the Family Dollar, the bar, a gas station.

“It meant everythin’ to me,” she snapped back vehemently. “I changed my mind. Let me out right here. That's my brother's truck." She pointed to the parking lot of the bar, tingling with relief. He made a sharp turn into the lot and parked right outside the door. 

“Alright. Here.” He searched around for a moment before he found a gas station receipt and an old pencil on the floor; he scribbled something down on the back of it and forced it toward her. 

“What’s this?” Sansa asked, half-in and half-out of the truck, more curious than suspicious now. 

“That’s the number for the police station.” 

“What am I gonna do with a Kentucky police station phone number?”

“If that little shit ever does anythin’ like that again, call and ask for Clegane. I feel responsible for that fuckin’ kid.” She smiled, big, like nothing bad had happened to her that day, like this was the first time anybody had ever done something nice for her. 

“Thanks.” He just grunted. As soon as she had slammed the door, Clegane hit the gas.

*

Let’s back up a few hours and check up on Theon Greyjoy’s upper left second canine tooth. It was just a little bit looser than it had been a couple of days before. He was slightly obsessed with this particular tooth. It had been uneasy in his mouth for years now, working itself away from his body a fraction of an inch at a time. It had first decided that it wanted its freedom in high-school after one of his father's more vicious backhands had cracked his jaw; it hadn't been able to work up the guts to leave the mouth then, but it was beginning to ponder its revolt anew. As he crawled out of bed and began to sort through the drifts and dunes of clothes on the floor for something semi-clean, Theon wiggled it with his tongue, coaxing it. He wished it would just come out already so he could have somebody put it back in the way it was supposed to be. 

The bedside table was littered with little balls of scorched tinfoil, crumpled up after their short lives as pipes had ended. Sheets and blankets and pillows were everywhere, twisted, dirtied with sweat and little dapples of blood and cum and maybe even a little vomit, foul-smelling. The belt—Ramsay’s belt, a multi-purpose tool, good for strangling and strapping and slapping—was looped around one of the bedposts. Theon could feel a spot on his back throbbing, a familiar throb—unmistakably the buckle-end. It was almost fun to discover all the marks on his body after he woke up from one of Ramsay Bolton's World Famous Crank Binges, try to remember or guess where they had come from. Ramsay liked it rough, and when Theon was high, so did he. They sober-fucked, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t as exciting. It was just boring, borderline abusive, self-loathing gay sex that both of them could feel heartily bad about afterwards, silently apologizing to their fathers, who _hadn’t raised no fags,_ and Jesus, who was probably pretty pissed about everything both of them had been doing with their lives since the eighth grade. Theon himself felt half-guilty, half-satisfied every time he let Ramsay into the house that his father had once owned—he wanted to feel like he was sticking it to somebody, but most of the time he just felt like a miserable junkie. 

There were three keys to a really good meth-induced fuck-a-thon:

_1\. Prolonging foreplay. A good high could last twelve hours. You can't just fuck for twelve hours straight. Get creative, stupid._  
_2\. Continuing to smoke meth for as long as you possibly could._  
_3\. Staying hydrated through the hours of terrifying auditory hallucinations that would follow the inevitable depletion of your meth supply until the merciful mini-death of sleep arrived._

Theon was on the unspoken, unwritten fourth step, maybe the hardest one of all— _try to go back to business as usual._

He was just gathering up the bedding for a trip to the laundromat when Ramsay came back with Gatorade, cigarettes, and off-brand Oreos called Black-n-Whities. He did not always come back. It was a toss-up. Sometimes he had things to do, people to see. He had already been perfecting the meth-induced fuck-a-thon way back when Theon had just been smoking pot and piercing his friends’ ears with sewing needles. He didn’t need as much time to bounce back. Still, a solid four consecutive days of wakefulness followed by a generous helping of tweaking out and heavy-duty sleeping could take their toll on anybody. Ramsay looked like he had been stranded on a desert island made of crystal meth; his eyes were bloodshot, his hair was unwashed, and he was working with a week’s worth of facial hair that he was not pulling off very well. Theon was sure that he looked much, much worse. He didn't want to care about how he looked. He didn't want to care about any of this, but this was the only way he could get what he wanted. If Ramsay got fed up and stopped coming around, he would be alone on Gay Island in the middle of a very straight and narrow sea. 

Ramsay sat down on the bare mattress and fumbled the cigarettes open. He always smoked like a chimney after he woke up from his meth-coma. He didn’t open the window. He didn’t talk or turn on the TV. The TV probably wouldn’t have turned on even if he had tried. The whole room filled with headachy smoke. Theon sat down in the middle of the mattress and tore open the bag of cookies. 

“Want a Black-n-Whitie?” Theon asked, his voice hoarse. “They look…almost like Oreos.”

“They didn’t have real Oreos,” Ramsay said absently. He was picking dead skin off his chapped lips. He had a weird fascination with dead skin. Once, when Theon had showed up with a nasty sunburn, Ramsay had taken great pleasure in peeling the white flakes of skin off, holding them up to the light, see-through. He liked scabs, too. He was like a kid in some ways.

“It’s alright,” Theon replied, pulling the cookie apart and beginning the long, arduous process of licking all the frosting out of the middle. "Tastes fine. You feel okay?” he asked Ramsay. Usually he was a little more cheerful than this. Usually he was more talkative, even if he was just talking about something creepy.

“I’m thinkin’.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the wall, habitual, one more black ash-mark there. 

“’Bout what?” Theon knew he was pushing his luck, but instead of snapping, Ramsay just smiled his most uncanny smile.

“Work.” Besides all the dealing and moving, Ramsay was an excellent muscle-man. If someone crossed his pa, well, there came Ramsay in his blue pick-up, his baseball bat rattling around in the bed of the truck. He took a little more pleasure in the bone-wood-crunch than most would have, sure, but it was all business at the end of the day. That was what Theon told himself.

“What else?”

“I’m thinkin’ about how this goddamn skull-fuckin' headache I got is worth it for the four days of fuckin' your brains out.”

“Oh, you really got that southern charm, doncha,” Theon drawled sarcastically, washing his Black-n-Whitie down with blue-flavored Gatorade. Ramsay laughed, that weird, sudden, sharp sound, and stole the Gatorade, took a long gulp. He set it down on the end table and pulled Theon to him with one of his strong, thick arms. There was a set of free-weights in the yard by the dog-pen. Ramsay wasn’t vain, not like that, but he had to swing that baseball bat pretty damn hard. 

Theon didn’t care that they were both revolting, reeking, and strung-out; he wrapped a wiry arm around Ramsay and laid his sticky, bristly, feverish cheek against the other man’s t-shirt.

“Do you gotta go?” he asked, hating himself as he said it. He could have at least tried to seem cool and disinterested. 

“I gotta go,” Ramsay confirmed. “But we can go huntin’ this week if you want.” Theon took perverse pleasure in hunting with Ramsay. Guns were foreplay. Steel and noise and dogs baying, animals screaming… It was the one thing they did together that other people could be privy to; just two bros huntin’ and drinkin’, a normal, masculine, no-touching-required activity. 

“I’m goin’ to meet Robb later," he blurted out as Ramsay reached for his coat. A spontaneous admission of guilt.

“You still hang out with that asshole?” He smiled, an incredulous smile that mocked.

“He’s my best friend.” Theon shrugged and started to kick articles of clothing across the scuffed boards into the laundry pile. He wished he hadn't said anything.

“Like hell he is. He thinks you’re trailer trash," Ramsay said very matter-of-factly. "Both you and me. He just likes havin’ us workin’ for him. Stuck-up prick.”

“He ain’t like that.”

“Sure.”

“His pa just died.”

“If only we all had the same fuckin’ luck.”

Theon had only ever met Roose Bolton in passing. The guy was a certified creep. Everybody was too afraid of him to start throwing around accusations, but he wasn’t getting invited to any Bolton family reunions or elementary school Christmas pageants. Nobody had been willing to let their kids go up to that trailer to play, especially since Ramsay had been the type of child who bit other children with alarming regularity. There was much speculation about what the hell Roose had done to the kid to make him so damn weird and give him that nasty oral fixation, but nobody had ever inquired after the details. 

“Yeah, I know.” Balon Greyjoy hadn’t been much nicer. Theon hadn't seen him in years, but his welfare checks were still coming to the house. That meant he must have still been alive, somewhere. At least he was off bothering somebody else. At least he had left the house standing when he went so that Theon had somewhere to sleep. 

Before he left, Ramsay took Theon’s jaw in his hand, squeezed hard until he opened his mouth, and then kissed him. 

*

“You haven’t been answerin’ your phone,” Robb said, wiggling his own phone accusingly at Theon as soon as he sat down across the scratched table. “Where you been?”

“Sorry I ain’t been there to answer your booty calls, Stark. I’m a hot-blooded young man. I been shacked up with some Kentucky slut all week pollutin’ my body and soul.” The bartender came by with her white, orthopedic nurses’ shoes and her filthy black apron and stared at them expectantly, face slack.

“Jack and Coke,” Robb said with a smile. He smiled like that at everyone, even now.

“Just water for me,” Theon said, which garnered him a strange look but thankfully no comments. This bar had been he and Robb’s haunt since long before they had actually been old enough to drink; they had played plenty of drunken games of pinball at the old sixties-type table, they had ricocheted off the old cedar-paneled walls in plenty of bar fights, and plenty of women had dumped drinks on both of them while they were sitting in those self-same ugly, green-cushioned chairs. The place didn’t have a name; the old owner had tried to put up a sign, but people had kept defacing it and/or stealing it, so they had just given up. All it said in the window was _Michelob Ultra_ and _Open_ and _LOTO_ in muted neon.

“What’s her name?” Robb asked.

“Daisy,” Theon answered quickly, giving the name of one of Ramsay’s hunting dogs. Daisy was a fat beagle and Theon’s favorite. He always snuck her some beef jerky when business, pleasure, or a combination of the two took him up to the trailer.

“Is Daisy an MMA fighter or what?" Robb asked, half-laughing, reaching across the table to poke at Theon's bruised face.

“Dunno 'bout that, but Daisy's boyfriend mighta been, the way he came in swingin'," he replied with his usual swagger, slapping his friend’s hand away.

“Now that's fuckin' typical." Robb rolled his eyes. “But seriously, man, I needed you. This whole damn thing is fallin’ apart underneath me. Dad is…gone, Uncle Bob is dead, Uncle Jon is dead, and Jaime fuckin’ Lannister is down Kentucky-way with his kissin’-sister and his crooked cops actin’ like he owns this whole fuckin’ operation. Bolton is actin’ just as fuckin’ crazy as he always does, which ain’t good for me because he’s the biggest producer I got and he’s liable to up and do any fool thing any day now. What am I gonna do?”

“You ever thought about gettin’ outta here?” Theon asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, gettin’ the fuck out of West Virginia, Robb.” He leaned back in his chair. “You don’t gotta take over your daddy’s fuckin’ crank empire. You’re smart. You graduated high school, unlike most of us inbred hicks. You could go somewhere else, get a job, start actin’ like a queer, buy a sweater-vest.” The bar-maid brought their drinks, dragging her feet, and then shuffled back over to the bar and plopped down onto one of the red leather stools.

“I can’t leave my family here, man,” Robb said, shaking his head and curling one of his bear-paw hands around his glass. “I just can’t. I thought about quittin’ this whole thing, gettin’ a job in the coal mine or somethin’, but I’d never make enough money to keep everybody fed, not even if I worked every hour of the goddamn day.” 

“Nobody gets shot workin’ in a coal mine,” Theon pointed out; he regretted it when Robb flinched.

“I reckon I’d rather get shot than get that black lung. Die hackin' up my own fuckin’ organs.” He paused for a moment, then wet his lips and said, “I called Jon last night to tell him about…everythin’ that went down. He got married.”

“ _Married?_ ”

“Met a little army-girl in the corps, I guess. It was the only way to stay together while they was gettin’ shuffled ‘round. He said not to tell anybody. He doesn’t want mama knowin’.”

“Well I’ll be damned.” It was hard to imagine Jon doing real-person things, but then, it had been a long time since Theon had seen him. “I wouldn’t want your mama knowin’ either if I was him. Jesus knows what crazy ol’ Cat would do.”

“Lay off my mama, asshole. I’m proud of him. He’s doin’ somethin’ with his life. When Sansa gets old enough, I’ll make sure she gets out of this shithole, too. Then Arya, then Brandon, then Ricky. I ain’t lettin’ a single one of them rot here like we have.” Theon liked being lumped together in the same group as Robb. It made him feel a little better about himself to think that Robb considered them equals. “And then, maybe, when all them are gone and it’s just mama and me, I’ll get the fuck out of here. But not until Ricky’s crossed the state line.”

“That’s admirable, man,” Theon said, clapping his friend on the shoulder. “You’re a real good guy.”

“No, I ain’t,” Robb said earnestly, looking up at him with one of the most complicated expressions of pain and disappointment and resignation that Theon had ever seen. “And neither are you. Now drink your fuckin’ water and help me figure out how to keep crazy Roose fuckin’ Bolton from takin’ all his cookin’ shit and runnin’ down to Kentucky to bend over for Lannister.”

Just then, Sansa hurried into the bar, let the door slam behind her, and rushed over to her brother. Robb only managed to get halfway to his feet before she had thrown her arms around him.

“Sansa? What happened?”

“Can you just take me home? Please?” she asked pitifully, muffled in his shoulder. Robb looked at Theon over his sister’s head, his eyebrows knitting.

“I gotta meet someone else here in a half hour…can you take her, Greyjoy?”

“Yeah, ‘course. Come on, Ginger Stark. Car’s outside.” He rose, jingling his keys, but Sansa shook her head quickly.

“I don’t wanna go with him.”

“Sansa, I’m real busy. Theon’ll get you home. We'll talk about it later.”

“It’s alright, kid.” He threw an arm around her and guided her toward the door; she didn’t resist. She let him deposit her in the passenger’s seat of his shitty Monte Carlo, flip on the radio— _sweet home Alabama_ —swear while he tried four times to start the car before the ignition caught. “You gonna make it, Ginger Stark?”

“I ain’t Ginger Stark,” she muttered, leaning her head against the cool of the window. “I’m Posh Stark.” He snorted a laugh and pulled out of the parking lot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prepare for Theon and Sansa to become soul sisters in the next chapter.


	3. The Girl Code

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's nobody left in the closet. Stan Baratheon is here to chew bubblegum, save souls, and commit hate crimes, and he's almost out of bubblegum. Robb falls in love with an Uptown Girl. Sandor saves the day (maybe.) None of this is going in a very lighthearted direction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I took so long to update! I was moving my life around as usual. Hopefully it won't take me as long in the future.

The trip from the bar to the Stark house took about twenty minutes. Sansa stared out the window for a while at the spring greenery flashing by, the tree-line occasionally broken by a trailer or a brightly colored pre-fab, their lawns littered with faded plastic toys and homeless car parts. The Monte Carlo clunked in a way that Sansa was pretty sure it shouldn’t have been clunking. Theon didn’t bother to avoid the pot-holes. After a moment, she turned her head to study the driver, who appeared to be sucking on one of his teeth. One of his cheeks was blotched green and violet with an already-healing bruise that crept up into the dark hollow under his eye. 

“What happened to your face, Greyjoy?” she asked without any real concern, kicking her feet up onto the dashboard. She couldn’t really bring herself to uncoil after the events of the day, but she thought that if she went through the motions, she might eventually be able to relax.

“Same thing that happened to yours. Got smacked with the ugly stick.” He didn’t look at her, but she made a face anyway.

“C’mon.”

“Well, what all happened to you today?” He raised his eyebrows at her and turned off the radio, indicating that he was all ears.

“Just more of Joff’s bullshit.”

“That kid is a little douchebag. I’m tellin’ you, Sansa. What’d he do now?” He turned off the main drag onto an unmarked road, gravel, downhill, teeth-rattling. Sansa sighed. He was going to find out sooner or later, and she decided that she’d rather confess to him than to Robb. Theon was like her unpredictable, honorary oldest brother—more fun than Jon, less rule-bound than Robb, meaner than both of them combined, but in a way she appreciated. Things didn’t shock him like they shocked her big-eyed, wholesome family.

“He left me back in the woods. He was shootin’ his gun, bein’ a dick like usual…I didn’t do what he wanted me to do, so he took my phone and left me back there.”

“Jesus Christ. How’d you get to the bar?”

“Hitched a ride from a cop who come by.” She did not mention that it hadn’t been a local cop, a cop who abided by the word of the law, or an on-duty cop. There were things even Theon couldn’t handle. 

“I’d kill that kid,” Theon said, shaking his head. “But your brother’ll get there first.”

“Don’t bother tellin’ Robb and sendin’ him on a fuckin’ crusade. Me and Joff are done. All I want is my phone back before mama finds out and skins me.” She paused for a moment. “’Sides. That cop I told you 'bout gave me his number. He don’t like Joff neither. I got enough knights for one damsel. Alright, come on. Now you.” She jostled him.

“I kinda got in a fight.”

“Well…how does the other guy look?” She was trying to make a joke, but it hit Theon in exactly the wrong way, in exactly the way that made his already uneasy stomach flip. He suddenly felt like he was going to die. All he had eaten in only God knew how long was a sleeve of cookies, he was pretty sure that he was hospital-grade dehydrated, and he had never been very good at keeping secrets in the first place. He didn’t think that he was sophisticated enough to live a double-life. Theon drummed his palms nervously against the steering wheel; he was about to regurgitate something, and he wasn’t sure if it was going to be a confession or a stomach-full of Black-n-Whities. 

“Can I tell you somethin’, Sansa?” Sansa had grown from a loud, annoying, prissy child into a loud, annoying, prissy young adult right in front of his eyes, but he trusted her like he trusted his sister. _More_ than he trusted his sister, who was a well-known blabbermouth. Sansa had a moral code: the Girl Code. Normally Theon would try to avoid being grandfathered in under the rules of that particular clause, but this was a special case.

“Sure, yeah,” she replied, furrowing her eyebrows and shrugging.

He had a lot stored up. Theon had been fourteen the first time he had kissed a boy. He had been sixteen and trashed when he let some dude suck him off in the back of a 1998 Toyota Corolla. He had been so drunk all the other times he could hardly remember what had happened and with who. The first time he had met Ramsay Bolton at one of Robb’s summer-bonfire-get-togethers, they had got in a fist fight. He had no memory of what the argument had been about, but he did remember losing, winding up on the floor with the wind knocked out of him and the other guy on top of him laughing like a maniac, bleeding from the mouth, with a raging boner. “You’re twisted,” Theon had concluded out loud, and he had said it again, albeit less clearly, with his face smashed up against the fraying pleather of the seat of Ramsay’s truck as he fucked him from behind in the middle of the woods somewhere. 

Of course, he didn’t actually say any of that. He was not ready to say any of that. Right in that particular moment, all he said was, “I think I’m gay.” He glanced at Sansa, cringing, but she just rolled her eyes. 

“Christ, is that all? I thought you were gonna tell me you fuckin' killed somebody,” she sighed. “Don’t look at me like that. I ain’t all that surprised, and I ain’t gonna tell anyone. Half this state has come out the closet to me.” She looked almost bored by his most well-guarded secret, which he might have found insulting if he hadn’t been so relieved. 

“Really?” 

“Who do you think gay boys tell first? Other boys? Their parents? They tell girls.” She was right. She obviously knew she was right, judging by her authoritative tone and the sassy way she was moving her hand as she talked, as if she were giving him an 80s-movie speech about being himself. “Have you told Robb this? _Of fuckin’ course_ you haven’t. You told me because I’m a girl. Don’t you worry, Theon. I’ll be your fag hag. I should have seen this comin’, honestly. Nobody fucks that many gross sluts unless they’re tryin’ to compensate.”

“You ain’t my fag hag.” Sansa ignored him pointedly. “I don’t fuck gross sluts.” She ignored him again. The whole conversation was starting to seem a little surreal.

“This’ll be great. I’ve always wanted a GBF.” She elbowed him good-naturedly and giggled. He scowled as he pulled into the Starks’ muddy driveway—several big, goofy hound-dogs trotted toward the car, wagging their tails in idle anticipation. He honked the horn at them, which did not deter them at all. They swarmed around the car.

“The fuck is a GBF?” The car jerked to a stop right behind Cat’s big white wheelchair-accessible van with the bumper sticker that read _“Jesus is Lord!”_

“A gay best friend, dumbass. You’re pretty sassy, too.” 

“I ain’t _sassy._ ” That was too much. Theon was starting to regret having said anything when suddenly, Sansa seemed to remember how this conversation had started. Her jaw dropped. She pointed at him accusingly, obviously searching for words.

“Holy shit. Your face. Do I know this guy? He’s gotta be a grade-A douchebag. That ain't normal, Theon."

“Oh my God. Get out of my car, Sansa.” He thunked his head against the back of the seat dramatically and glared at her. 

“I am not done with you, Greyjoy. Not even close. You’re gettin’ the full fag hag treatment," she warned as she opened the door and planted one foot firmly in the mud. "I am on this fuckin' case. I'm gonna crack you."

"Whatever." Sharp-eyed, she darted back into the car and grasped him firmly by the chin.

"Take care of yourself, okay? You promise? I'll see you later?"

"See you later, Sansa." 

She was already halfway to the door before she realized that he hadn't promised.

*

The Health Wagon came to the holler that week. They came twice a year or so, a caravan of rich-white-guilt-bearing nurses from the affluent parts of Virginia and West Virginia who volunteered to give free healthcare to the largely uninsured rural population. Most everyone went to have a check-up, at least, to get vaccinated, to get their teeth and their eyes checked. The gals parked their smart white-and-green RV in the parking lot of the Family Dollar and erected a tarp-and-pole series of tents under which they would sit, performing their little Florence Nightingale routines. There was a line of plastic chairs for the waiting patients, but only the extremely old and the extremely hungover sat down. Everyone else preferred to stand, shifting restlessly from foot to foot, bouncing between embarrassment and resignation. 

Theon went to see if they could pull out his enemy-tooth. He had hitched a ride with the Starks, who had loaded the whole family into the van with a fair amount of kicking, screaming, and hair-pulling. Arya wanted to bring her BB gun—without which she had rarely been seen since her father's death—which sent Cat spiraling into a long, tearful soliloquy about how violence never solved anything. Brandon was insisting that he had seen enough doctors and that there was nothing that a bunch of nurses under a tent could do for him, and Ricky had caught a frog that he thought also might need a check-up. While Cat had dragged her three youngest over to the pediatrics line, Sansa, Robb, and Theon had broken free from the squabbling pack and went to stand in line with half the holler. Theon had been right behind Robb, but it had taken the prettiest nurse there ten minutes and counting to take the smarmy asshole’s blood pressure. He was willing to bet that it was elevated, alright, but certainly not because of chronic hypertension. Robb Stark had Uptown Girl Syndrome real bad. The symptoms included repeatedly falling in love outside of one’s own social class, excessive mooning and pining, and a disastrous end to the affair that tended to make everyone involved look bad. Theon wanted to inform the woman of what she was about to become involved in, but that would have just made him look bitter. 

“I guess some of us ain’t handsome enough for health care,” he remarked to Sansa, who was behind him, half-listening to a balding old woman in sagging pink sweatpants listing her extremely long list of extremely petty ailments. He saw Robb’s eyes flick to the side, narrow slightly. The nurse was now very sensually feeling his lymph nodes. “I wasn’t sick when I got here, but I fuckin’ am now." Sansa clapped her hand over her mouth to contain her laughter. The nurse was pretending not to have heard this exchange. She straightened up, all dark, flat-ironed hair, fake tan, and lip-gloss-pink mouth, smiled a little tightly, and snapped off her rubber gloves, but not before tucking the phone number she had gotten into the pocket of her scrubs. 

“Who’s next?”

The three of them walked home together afterwards, leaving Cat, the kids, and the van behind. The Health Wagon dental team had refused Theon's request. They said his tooth was still very much anchored in his mouth, but if that was true, then why did it feel like it was trying to crawl out of his head using its roots like sharp little feet? 

“So when are you two gettin’ married?” Sansa teased, poking her brother in the ribs. Robb flicked her in the head, scuffing his boots in the dust. The road was lined with brush, prickers, and newly-fruiting berry bushes that netted clusters of shrill little song-birds. Sparrows and fat house wrens loudly vied for purchase. Stray cats and empty beer cans that had been thrown from the windows of moving cars filled the ditches.

“I dunno, but we’re goin’ out tonight," he replied; he had the grace to look at least a little sheepish.

“She ain’t from around here, my man," Theon said, clapping his friend on the shoulder. "What’s she gonna think of your day job?” As soon as it left his mouth, he regretted it, as he often regretted the things that left his mouth. Robb looked like he'd been punched in the gut. He was way too sensitive to be running a drug ring.

“She seemed open-minded,” Sansa said quickly, trying to smooth things over. "She had, like, a nose ring."

“Yeah. Open-minded enough to feel you up in front of a crowd of people," Theon added, which earned him a cuff to the side of the head and a workout in the form of being chased all the way back to the house by the Stark siblings.

*

The word came down the grapevine, as all news did: Bob’s youngest brother, Renly, had been found on the side of some Kentucky dirt road with the shit kicked out of him and a bullet in his skull along with Maggie Tyrell’s little brother, barely eighteen, bloodied and broken-boned but still alive. Someone had left a reason why at the scene of the crime: _"God Hates Fags"_ in big, condemning spray-paint letters. Word was that Renly’s own brother had done it; Stan was a staunch Pentecostal who had left his wife for a revival-tent preacher-woman and had been running around bothering everyone with his hellfire and brimstone ever since, trying to save everybody’s souls. He had hated all of Bob’s unlawful indiscretions, had openly, vocally, and obnoxiously opposed it. When he had found out about the sins of his remaining brother, he had just gone and snapped, they said, gone and disappeared. Nobody had seen him in a fortnight when he wandered into the bait-n-tackle store with his lady on his arm.

Theon pretended to be reading a curling, yellowed newspaper article tacked to the wall about Balon Greyjoy’s thriving fly-fishing tours. He pretended to be interested in the suspicious, gummy, reddish puddle under the humming bait fridge that he hadn’t ever had the heart or the stomach to clean up. He pretended not to see the known fugitive browsing his selection of old fishing wire, batteries, bags of Lays originals, nail polish remover, those fake, jelly-type green lures that everyone has but nobody ever uses, three different types of drain cleaner, and various other odds and ends, all displayed on shelves that looked like someone had dumped some cheap white paint on some plywood around twenty years ago and then had forgotten about it (which was, in fact, what had happened.)

“Did you know that I’m the messenger of Jesus Christ?” Despite Theon’s best attempts at looking disinterested, the lunatic had zeroed in on him, as lunatics always seemed to do. Stan was leaning against the counter, a thin, balding man with deep circles under his eyes and a few days of greasy stubble on his face. His eyes looked bright and wild and he smelled like diesel and BO. The preacher-woman was right behind him, a pretty redhead who always seemed to be wearing a floral dress and carrying a Bible, as if breaking contact with it would weaken her spiritual powers. She looked vaguely unhinged. Theon was pretty sure she was high. 

“That’s right, baby!” she crowed, hanging on Stan’s arm and cackling.

“Yeah?” Theon was trying his best to be neutral, but there was clearly enough sarcasm left over in his tone to indicate that he wasn’t buying it. Stan narrowed his eyes and spat a wad of chew onto the floor. Thankfully at that moment, the door opened, jingling the ancient sleigh-bell that was nailed to the doorway. Theon couldn't decide whether he was relieved or horrified that it was Ramsay, back for the third time that day. When his pa was cooking, he was always in and out of the store, always forgetting something or not getting enough of another thing and usually in a terrible mood. Of course, they had all the makings of a batch of methamphetamine at the Family Dollar, but they also had video cameras and federal regulations there. Theon barely had a cash register. 

“What’s up, Stan?” Ramsay asked boisterously as if the man wasn’t literally on the run from the law, clapping him on the back. Theon blinked, confused, though he wasn't sure why anything surprised him anymore.

“Don’t touch me,” Stan grumbled, but he made no move, rigid and clearly uncomfortable. The woman had frozen as well, her eyes narrowed, her Bible tucked snugly under her arm.

“Aw, alright. If I see you ‘round here again I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off, ya hear?” Ramsay swiped some acetone off the shelves, smiling amiably as if he just made a remark about the weather.

“Same to you, boy.”

“Nice to see you, you sick ol’ fuck. Give Stan a bottle of Coke, Theon.”

“…Alright.” He edged over to the little glass-fronted fridge that held assorted, likely expired soft drinks and tossed a Coke in Stan’s direction. As long as it kept the guy from killing them all. Stan nodded at him, no longer willing to meet his eyes, and hightailed it out of the store with his woman on his heels.

“What the hell was that?” Theon asked, watching out the window as the two hopped back into the battered Jeep that the police were supposedly looking out for and hurriedly pulled out of the gravel lot.

“Me and Stan understand each other real well,” Ramsay said nonchalantly, dumping the bottles of bright purple nail polish remover into a plastic bag. 

“I bet you do,” Theon replied, watching him closely. “You gonna pay for that?” He hoped he’d never have to see just how well the pair of them understood each other—in fact, he hoped that he’d never have to see Stan again. As it turned out, it was only a matter of days before he saw the creepy motherfucker again, though under much different circumstances. But we’ll get to that in a little while. 

Let’s make a Very Confusing Leap in Time now. Sometimes in a narrative, a writer will choose to make a Very Confusing Leap in Time in order to illustrate a point or to add suspense, or else to structure their story a little more artfully. This story is neither suspenseful nor artful, so in order not to confuse the readership, the writer has chosen to include very distinct labels, one of which you will see right after the break.

*

THREE DAYS LATER, IN THE MORNING, AFTER THEON’S SECOND UNFORTUNATE MEETING WITH STAN BUT IN A VERY DIFFERENT LOCATION FROM THAT MEETING:

Sansa came downstairs on Saturday morning, hair in a fuzzy red knot on top of her head, wearing only a big old t-shirt that had belonged to one of her brothers, some underwear, and slippers, to find Sissy Lannister sitting at her kitchen table, sharing a pot of coffee with Cat. Sissy was immediately recognizable for three things: the long, golden hair that she kept braided down her back like a hillbilly Lady Godiva, her ever-present grimace, and her tap, tap, tapping fingernails. She was always tapping, always impatient, always counting down to some nebulous, inevitable doom. Sansa’s sleepy eyes honed in immediately on those pink-painted fingernails, long, fake press-ons, tap-tap-tapping on the sunsplashed wood of the kitchen table.

“Sansa, sweetheart,” the woman said immediately, as Cat turned in her seat, looking a bit bewildered. The Book of Mormon was open in front of her; she had obviously been in the middle of her morning reading when Sissy had barged in, as Sissy was wont to do. “Good mornin’! I got somethin’ for ya. You left it in Joff’s truck.” She reached into her purse and pulled out Sansa’s phone

“Thanks, ma’am,” the girl whispered, darting forward quickly to pluck her phone out of Sissy’s claws.

“You can call me Sissy, you know that, sugar.” Her smile was somehow more frightening than her grimace; it was too plump, too pink, too much tooth. 

“Sorry. Sissy.”

“Well, I better be goin’. I just loved chattin’ with you this mornin’, Cat. If there’s anythin’ I can do for you in these hard times you just let me know.” She touched Cat’s arm sympathetically and stood up, tottering on tall, cheap pink heels. She turned her laser-beam eyes on Sansa again “Will you walk me to my car, baby?”

“’Course, ma’am,” she replied, in a blind panic, forgetting the fact that she wasn’t wearing pants. She slid on a pair of muddy boots that had been abandoned on the doormat and followed the imposingly tall woman out of the house and across the yard. Sissy’s heels stuck in the sodden turf, but it didn’t appear to bother her; she just pulled them out step by step with brisk little squelches. She lit a cigarette and puffed on it determinedly as they made their way to the cute lime-green dune buggy that was Sissy’s signature ride. 

“Do you smoke, Sansa?”

“No, ma’am.” She had become aware of her pantslessness and was trying to tug her t-shirt down even lower. 

“Good girl. It’s such a nasty habit.” She did not look at Sansa. She opened the door to her car. “I don’t think you should come around my boy no more, sugar.” Sansa’s throat froze; all she could do was nod.

“You’re such a good girl,” the woman crooned, patting her shoulder. Her talons grazed Sansa’s neck, and she had to fight not to recoil. “Always have been.” She tossed her cigarette into the grass, got into her car, and then she was gone. Sansa ran back inside, kicked off her boots, shot past her mother—who she did not want to speak with—and back up the stairs, into the room she shared with Arya. The two beds were butted up against opposite walls, one sparkly pink and the other emblazoned with the Power Rangers. The walls were blank because they couldn’t agree on any decorations. Sansa had stuck some pictures in the little mirror over the dresser—she and Maggie, the whole family together, Ned Stark in his youth wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat—but other than that, the room was impersonal, cramped, smelly, no matter how many candles Sansa lit. 

Arya was still asleep; she looked smaller when she slept. Sansa felt a lot more tenderness toward her when her mouth was shut and her fists were still, so she tried not to wake her sister as she flopped down on her bed and plugged in her phone to see what she had missed. A few ‘where are you’ texts from Maggie, which quickly tapered off into annoyance and then radio silence. A few missed calls from her mother. That was all. She hadn’t known what she had been expecting. She didn’t know why she was disappointed. Sansa opened the drawer in her nightstand and pulled out the receipt that Sandor Clegane had given her; she created a new contact, filled in the info, hemmed and hawed about what to title it. Should she try to be surreptitious? Was this like having a drug dealer? Finally, she decided just to use the policeman emoji. Simple, evocative, interesting, mysterious. 

Sansa was just thinking about lying down and sleeping her disappointment off until about noon or so when her phone began to buzz, making her jump. She crinkled her nose at the screen, confused, but picked up anyway.

“Theon?” she said quietly, glancing at Arya, who was still dead to the world.

“Hey, um. Good mornin’. Did you mention the other day that you’re kinda cozy with a cop?”

“What for?” 

“Does he…clean stuff up?” A dog barked in the background. Sansa swallowed and chewed her thumbnail.

“What kind of stuff?”

*

A few minutes later, another phone rang just across the state line in a drafty, moldy old police station that had more leaks in the ceiling than computers on the desks. One of the officers picked up, listened for a moment while he picked his teeth, and then shouted,

“Hey, Sandy! It’s for you!”


	4. Anyway, Here's "Wonderwall"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sandor and Ramsay clean up a mess, Sansa and Theon _are_ messes, and Roose Bolton is fixing to make an even bigger mess than all of those messes combined if all these damn kids don’t stop fucking each other and get down to business.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry the first part of this chapter is about wrestling? I may have fudged the timeline of the WWE slightly. I wrote a lot of it from my own fond memories of me and my brother’s childhood love affair with pro wrestling, so I have no idea how accurate it actually is. Take it up with the chairman. On another note, I tried to take this chapter in a more solemn direction since it deals with some fairly grim subject matter, but I couldn’t completely turn off my giggle-box. It’s just who I am.
> 
> Aside from memes and "Wonderwall," this chapter was heavily influenced by the Mountain Goats song “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero.” John Darnielle is the man and you should be aware of that fact. I also highly recommend the albums _The Sunset Tree_ and _Tallahassee_ not only for this fic, but for your life in general. Basically, stop reading this and just go listen to the Mountain Goats.
> 
> Anyway, here's "Wonderwall."

Let’s talk about professional wrestling for a minute.

Professional wrestling is a staple of any hillbilly kid’s childhood. There’s a kind of folding chair-based justice there that children can understand, especially poor kids, especially kids who don’t have the means or the vocabulary to express that bad things are happening to them and somebody needs to be punished for it. In the world of professional wrestling, the bad guys are punished with clothesline-punches to the face and barbed-wire baseball bats right to their spandex-clad asses. The satisfaction is immediate, violent, and encouraged by a million people cheering in the stands. Every kid has a hero and that hero’s enemies are the kid’s enemies. 

Robb Stark was lame. He had liked The Rock. Everyone liked The Rock. It was easy to like The Rock just like it was easy to like Robb. Theon was boring too. He had liked Stone Cold Steve Austin because Stone Cold was a total asshole who was always swearing and chugging beers, but he was still a good guy. He dealt out justice in his own crude way, but it was justice nonetheless. Plus he had a motorcycle. On the other hand, Ramsay Bolton had liked The Undertaker. The Undertaker was a complicated character who had been precariously constructed half from an illiterate person’s idea of what Edgar Allan Poe’s writings may have been about and half from pure drug-fueled weirdness. At one point he had been a kind-of-goth-looking buff guy. At one point he had been a biker. At one point he had been some random asshole who called himself “Big Evil.” But at his prime, The Undertaker had been a hulking tattooed man in a spandex body-suit, a sweeping black cloak, leather boots, a wide-brimmed Nathaniel Hawthorne hat, and a whole hell of a lot of eyeliner. He had been carried to the ring in a coffin, accompanied by the grim tolling of church bells. Every wrestler, even the most well-oiled and well-steroided among them, was terrified of him.

The Undertaker prided himself on his 21-0 streak at Wrestlemania. It had begun before Ramsay was born and had ended long after he had lost interest in professional wrestling along with his peers, having discovered boobs and drugs, but The Streak had really glued his fragmented childhood together. If there was one thing he was sure of, it was that The Undertaker was going to win at Wrestlemania every year. This certainty was grouped with other less pleasant certainties, both environmental and historical. 

For instance, it was certain that his mother had not bothered to stop smoking meth while she had been pregnant, and it was certain that she was dead now, though no-one seemed to be quite sure of why or how or where. It was certain that he was going to have to eat white bread and hot dogs most days because that was the only thing he could figure out how to cook. It was certain that he had to keep the TV muted when his father was home, because the slightest disturbance could make ol' Roose decide to start throwing hands. It was certain that none of his furniture or possessions or any combination of the two could block his door well enough to keep his father from crawling into his bed reeking of hot, sharp liquor, squeezing the sides of his jaw until it popped painfully, until he had to open his mouth for dirty fingers that tasted like motor oil and chemicals, manhandling dinosaur pajama pants around his ankles then on the floor. Ramsay had always replayed The Undertaker’s most recent win in his head, the details, the moves, the trash-talk, the finisher, again and again until it was over. 

You have to understand. The WWE doesn’t cause kids to become violent. The kids were born violent. It just gives them an outlet until they’re old enough to buy a gun. It lets them live out their revenge-fantasies until they can start beating their significant others and putting bullets through things that are smaller and dumber than they are. 

Nobody understood all of this better than Theon, though his understanding was instinctual rather than based on any actual knowledge of the other man's past. He, too, had learned most of what he knew from dodging thrown objects and ducking poorly-thrown punches. Two things ran rampant in the holler: substance abuse and poverty, and when those were combined with family life, they often reacted explosively and boiled over into a brouhaha of therapy material. It was an almost universal experience.

Since he understood on a fundamental level the desire to shoot things and then rifle through their guts, going hunting with Ramsay was fun for Theon. Not regular, ice-cream-and-flying-kites fun, but fun like watching a horror movie while you’re really baked is fun. The fear was real, very tangible, very present, but at the same time, the awareness that he wasn’t actually going to die was firmly fixed in the back of his mind. That wasn’t to say that there weren’t going to be any close calls. He was sure to end up at the wrong end of the shotgun at some point, but it was just like professional wrestling or the "Blair Witch Project:" scripted. He was smart enough to know that Ramsay wasn’t going to shoot him, not yet, at least, not as long as he was still playing his part. 

Right then, his part involved holding onto Isabella’s leash. Isabella was a bluetick coonhound who was way too enthusiastic about doing her job. She was racing from tree to tree sniffing everything in her path, and no amount of dog treats or jerks on her collar could calm her down. Theon was being dragged along behind her in an erratic zig-zag while Ramsay marched in front of them, holding his shotgun in one hand and a six-pack in the other. It was just before dawn. It was easier to hunt raccoons in their native domain: the night. The woods were a gauzy grey, dewy, rippling with a brisk chill.

“You’re scarin’ the critters off,” Ramsay remarked without turning around. 

“Ain’t me. ‘S your dog,” Theon snapped back, yanking Isabella to a straining halt. Ramsay stopped, turned around, and raised one eyebrow.

“You sayin’ I ain’t trained Isabella right?”

“You ain’t done somethin’.” Isabella sat down, began to chew on her own foot, unbalanced herself, and fell over into a mud puddle. Theon was beginning to think that she wasn’t smart enough to be anybody’s hunting dog. 

“You wanna say that again so my friend here can hear you?” Ramsay lifted his gun one-handed and poked Theon in the chest with the muzzle. He didn't even look mad. He looked vaguely amused, as if threats of mortal violence were cutesy gestures tantamount to a teasing smack on the arm. 

“Don’t point that fuckin’ thing at me.” Theon snapped, giving Isabella's leash a jerk to stop her from rolling in the puddle. Ramsay stayed where he was for another heartbeat as if he was deciding whether or not this request deserved consideration, then shrugged, retracted his threat, leaned the weapon up against a nearby tree, and untangled one of the beers from its plastic netting. He cracked it open as if that was an acceptable thing to do at 6:00 A.M.

“I don’t wanna fight with you today, sweetheart,” he drawled. “It’s a beautiful day to get trashed before noon and shoot somethin’.”

“Don’t call me sweetheart.” Theon didn't like the malicious way the other man threw around terms of endearment. He didn't like terms of endearment at all. "Sweetheart" was somehow a little bit gayer than fucking another man, and he wasn't ready to be that gay, not while he was stone-cold sober, at least. “Can we just keep walkin'?"

“C’mere,” he said, setting the can down beside the gun and snagging one of Theon's belt loops with a hooked finger before he could back out of arm's reach. “Let go of that dumbass dog.” Theon released Isabella’s leash automatically; she was still licking her crotch in the puddle, oblivious. Ramsay dragged him over, overcoming Theon's mild resistance with his much superior strength, until they were chest to chest, camouflage jacket on camouflage jacket. He planted his hand firmly on Theon's ass and snapped their hips together. "Don't you wanna gimme a kiss?" 

“Not really, after you threatened to shoot me.” Theon turned his face away just in time to avoid said kiss, clamping his mouth shut stubbornly. 

“I was just playin'," Ramsay snorted, releasing the other man with a smack to the side of the head that was just a little too hard to be funny. He wasn't smiling anymore; genuine irritation could make his whole face change from that of a amiable, unoffensive country kid to that of the murderer you saw in one of those painted renderings of high-profile court cases. "Have a drink and don’t be such a bitch.” At that moment, Isabella shot to her feet, her nose in the air, gave one long, precursory bay, and then ran full tilt off into the forest, trailing her leash behind her. Without another word, Ramsay turned, snatched up his gun, and took off after her at a jog. Theon didn't want to be a bitch, so he wasn't far behind, alcohol in arms. As they followed Isabella following the raccoon, the unpleasant smell of burning hair reached their noses mingled with something else, something charred, something vaguely meaty. Somebody illegally burning trash, probably. Maybe some animal had electrocuted itself on somebody’s electric fence. 

Isabella had skidded to a halt at the foot of an immense, half-dead maple tree. She had planted her front paws on the trunk and was baying furiously up at the critter she had treed. They could hear the ‘coon chittering angrily in reply, hidden somewhere in the branches.

“See? Perfectly good fuckin’ dog,” Ramsay cracked, his mood restored, raising his gun to eye-level. He had a night vision scope screwed on, but even so, it took a moment of searching before he found his target and pulled the trigger. People could say whatever they wanted about Ramsay Bolton, but nobody could say that he wasn’t a good shot. The raccoon tumbled from the branches and hit the ground with a surprisingly loud _thud._ Isabella was on it immediately, its neck between her teeth, shaking it to make sure it was dead, slinging blood everywhere. At a whistle from her master, she dropped the kill. It was a fat one, its spindly humanoid arms curled in, its sharp face matted with blood.

“I think we got a mama-to-be,” Ramsay remarked, picking it up by its banded tail. “That’ll be fun to take apart.”

“You’re fuckin’ weird,” Theon remarked, more out of habit than anything else, but his mood had changed as well. He might not have liked being on the barrel-side of the gun, but the power and the confidence with which Ramsay hunted non-human game was a huge turn-on. Ramsay knew this. It was one of the many reasons it was hard to let go of whatever fucked-up thing they were doing to one another; each of them had a deep, confidential understanding of the other's weirdness.

“I’ll show you fuckin’ weird," Ramsay said, leaning close to the other man for the kiss he had been denied before. But before this bizarre game of grab-ass became anything more, Isabella appeared to lock in on another target. She took off back the way they had come, and, ready for the hunt to continue, the two men followed. It wasn’t long before they came out into a narrow clearing. There was no raccoon in sight, but it looked like somebody been camped out there for a few days; a ratty tent was pitched off to the side, surrounded by discarded cans, bottles, wrappers, boots, filthy blankets, and dirty pots and pans. On the opposite side of the clearing, a fire pit was still smoldering and smoking. Isabella had parked herself outside of the tent and was pawing at the fabric, howling to wake the dead. Without preamble, Ramsay strode across the clearing, kicked his dog aside, and unzipped the tent flap with a few sharp motions. Hiding inside, having obviously heard the barking long before they had actually arrived on the scene, was Stan Baratheon, looking even worse for the wear than he had a few days before.

“For Christ’s sake,” Ramsay sighed, nudging the tent flap out of the way with the barrel of his gun. “I fuckin’ told you ten fuckin’ times, Stan.” He didn't wait for a response before he emptied the chamber into Stan's head, splattering the sides of the tent with bucketfuls of grey matter, blood, and skull fragments. Now, none of this would have been a big deal on its own. Ramsay had shot and dumped a fair amount of people in his life, some at his father’s behest, some not. It was actually ideal, as the whole mess had been contained inside of the tent. What complicated things was the contents of the hastily-made fire pit that Stan had obviously been tending to before he had been discovered.

“Bones,” Ramsay remarked dispassionately. “Little ‘uns.” He exhaled loudly through his nose. “This ain’t good. The state of West Virginia don’t care much for Stan, but the feds’ll be here in ten fuckin’ minutes if they get wind of this. Why in blue hell he would do somethin' fuckin' stupid like light up a kid is beyond me." He did not seem overly concerned about the untimely death of the child, no doubt Stan's own little daughter. Here we could posit many theories here as to why ol' Stan would commit brazen filicide. Perhaps he had wanted to erase any trace of his godless union with his wife, or get rid of the best tool she had against him in their vicious divorce proceedings. Maybe he had found the mark of the devil on her and decided to cleanse her through the fire of the Lord. Maybe he had accidentally killed her and burned the body to hide the evidence. Maybe there was no reason. Maybe he was just fucking crazy. In any case, it didn't really matter, because regardless of Stan's no-doubt fascinating and psychologically complex justification, it was now Ramsay and Theon's fucking problem to cover the whole thing up unless they wanted the FBI to mosey on over to the holler, investigating and drying up their entire livelihood in the process.

“Jesus shit-fucking Christ. What’re you gonna do?” Theon had whiplash. It wasn’t that he had never seen someone get shot—he had, more times more than he would have liked to have seen someone get shot, but he had never seen someone get shot and then stagger onto a murder scene in the space of five minute before. Ramsay toed at a charred femur with his boot.

“You got any friends who can keep their mouths shut?” 

*

It was less than an hour before the rusty brown pick-up came bumping up the ill-used, rutted path. Sandor and Sansa got out, the girl still in her pajamas with the addition of a pair of sweatpants, the man still in his police uniform. 

“Why is that Stark girl here?” Ramsay hissed, his hand clamping down around Theon’s bicep. They were sitting on a rotten log by the tent, Isabella panting at their feet, the dead raccoon forgotten by the fire pit. 

“Ow. I called her, didn’t I? She won’t say nothin’. She’s fine.”

“Christ.” Ramsay rolled his eyes, then stood raised his voice to call across the clearing to his fellow n’er-do-well. “I reckon you don’t want the feds pokin’ ‘round here anymore than I do, Clegane.”

“You’re right on that, Bolton,” Sandor called back, his hands on his hips, appraising the gruesome scene as if he were appraising a fender-bender. “But I’m not sure I see the problem. Just dump the poor fucker in the lake.”

“Look in the fire pit.” Ramsay jerked his head at the smoldering remains of the fire. Sandor ambled over and squinted down at the pathetic collection of little bones and pebble-like teeth.

“Well fuck.”

“That’s what I said.”

Sansa scurried over to the log and sat next to Theon on the old log, noticed that he was drinking at 10:00 in the morning, then took a beer for herself. He didn’t bother to stop her. 

"You didn't have to come with him, Sansa," he said immediately. Robb would fucking kill him if he ever knew that Theon had dragged his little sister to a murder scene. Then, there were a lot of ways that Robb would have mishandled this situation, which was exactly why Theon hadn't called him in the first place. Stark was too morally upright for his own good, a characteristic he had not managed to transmit to his eldest sister.

"I wanted to," she replied. "I asked him to pick me up. I wanted to make sure you were doin' okay." She sipped her drink, obviously trying to still the shaking of her pale fingers. “It’s the little girl in the fire pit?” she asked, her green eyes enormous in her sharp face. “I mean, like…his daughter?”

“Guess so. Don’t know who else it would be.”

“Oh my God. Why…?” 

“Who knows. He was a pretty sick son of a bitch." Theon grimaced. "Looks like you got the only half-way normal pa in West Virginia.” 

“I dunno if daddy was normal.” Sansa matched his grimace and did her best to chug as much of her breakfast-beer as she could. If there had ever been a moment when alcohol had been necessary, it was this one.

“At least he was good to you.” Theon tapped his can against hers in a sort of cheers to the ghost of Ned Stark and then followed suit. 

“Yeah. He was.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. They sat in silence for a moment, watching Sandor and Ramsay don plastic gloves and begin to sweep the contents of the pit into plastic bags like a forgotten hillbilly episode of _Bones._ After a moment, Sansa whispered,

“Is he the guy?”

“What?”

“You know. Bolton. Is he the guy.” None of the gleefulness of the previous week colored her tone. Her voice was thick with unshed tears and sleep that she hadn’t shaken off quite yet. She didn’t want to think about what was happening in front of her; she scratched Isabella’s ears absently, which pleased the forgotten hound greatly.

“Not right now, Sansa.”

“Okay. But I think you just answered my question.”

“What about you, Ginger Stark?” he retorted. “Sandor Clegane’s your cop friend? I thought you were just talkin’ ‘bout some idiot yokel who thought you was pretty. You’re full of fuckin’ surprises. I woulda thought you would be somewhat opposed to them Lannisters and their kin, considerin’.”

“I am,” she replied tersely. “But he ain’t one of them."

“If you say so.”

It took a while, but between them, Sandor and Ramsay managed to pack up all the human remains, erase the traces of the fire, and roll Stan and his garbage up in the tent for easy portability. All of this went in the bed of Sandor’s truck so that it could be driven back to Ramsay’s truck at the trailhead, transferred, and carted away under a tarp to be disposed of through the proper channels. When the guns, the dog, the dead mama raccoon, the bodies, the detritus of Stan's outdoor adventure, and both men had been packed into the truck, they went on their way with few pleasantries exchanged. Theon didn’t look like he particularly wanted to be riding shotgun in the evidence-mobile, but as they pulled away, he left Sansa with a small wave and a forced smile. She figured he would be okay. He had somehow managed to be okay thus far. 

Back in Clegane’s truck, Sansa found herself nauseated by the thought of walking back into her house, past her mother poring over the Book of Mormon, past her siblings, none of whom she had anything to say to. None of whom she could share any of this with, her rapidly evolving life, the growing number of things she was hiding, the gutter she was sliding into.

“I don’t wanna go home,” she blurted. “Don’t take me home.” Sandor, who had just gotten in and shut the door, glanced at her quizzically. 

“That wasn’t what you were sayin’ last time you was in my truck,” he said, but the half-joke fell flat. She was still clutching her second can of breakfast-beer, sipping it absentmindedly. “You alright, little girl?”

“Yeah. I’m alright. You do stuff like that…very often?” She knew that he did what the Lannisters told him to do, but it hadn't occurred to her how often that might have been "dispose of human remains" until she had seen how calmly he had reacted to the sight of Stan's pulped head and the fire pit full of bones.

“Not very often. Usually not before noon.” They were bouncing down the old path, swerving to avoid the worst of the potholes and the branches that had fallen in the road, a good ten minutes from any real road still.

“I’m sorry I called you. I just didn’t know what to do,” she mumbled, looking down at the can she was holding in her lap. Her fingers were cold. She switched hands.

“’S fine.” Sandor shrugged. Two beers on an empty stomach and the adrenaline rush of the less-than-legal activities of the morning had Sansa Stark halfway to total delirium. Her head was full of static, she couldn’t think a complete thought, and she couldn’t help but stare at her new partner in crime, who cut an almost dashing figure in his uniform. She felt safe with this man. Sansa hadn’t felt safe in a long time, not since her father had been killed.

“I don’t wanna ruin your day or nothin’,” she said softly, leaning her head against the window, relishing the cool against her hot cheek.

“Don’t be sorry, now. You’re not bad-lookin’, Sansa Stark. Everybody needs to look at somethin’ halfway decent after they spent the whole mornin’ pickin’ up human bones.”

“That’s the nicest thing you said to me so far, and it wasn’t even that nice,” she giggled, covering her face with the horrible mirth of it, peeking out at him between her fingers. Sandor did not crack a smile. She had forgotten that she had asked not to go home. She had no idea where they were going. She did not care where they were going. The world seemed a lot more perilous than it had just a few hours ago when her biggest problem had been Sissy Lannister breaking up with her.

“I can be nice,” he said indignantly. She snorted, unconvinced, then lapsed back into her silence, unable to shake her mental image of the small, perfect, blackened bones disappearing into bags…

“You really think…the police ain’t gonna…” Her hand dropped back into her lap. She finished the beer and dropped the can unceremoniously onto the already-cluttered floor. 

“They’ll look for the kid,” Sandor said. “But they won’t find ‘er. They’ll give up before long. I just hope he killed ‘er before he lit that fire.” Sansa squinted at him. She pursed her lips. She decided that she was drunk enough to ask the question. 

“How’d that happen to your face?” He shot her a look, but she just blinked back at him innocently, not budging. She wanted to know. He sighed deeply. He seemed to do a lot of deep sighing when she was around.

“It was my brother, Greg. We were at a Boy Scouts camp-out when we was kids. I had lost my sash with all the badges, so I borrowed his. Made him real mad. He pushed me right into the fire.” Sandor took one hand off the wheel to pantomime viciously holding somebody's head down. Sansa cringed. 

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked," she said quietly, shaking her head. "I can be real nosy sometimes."

“Yeah, I noticed. Anyway, I only told you ‘cause you ain’t gonna remember tomorrow.”

“Listen here," Sansa said indignantly. "I ain’t all that drunk. Pull over.” She pointed commandingly to the side of the road like a princess reprimanding an insolent coachman. 

“What for? You gonna puke?”

“Just pull the fuck over." Sandor had no desire to clean vomit out of his truck on that particular occasion. He did as he was told. As soon as the truck stuttered to a stop in the shadow of an ancient pine, Sansa slid across the bench seat and planted a kiss on the scar tissue that marred his temple.

“That’s for helpin’ my friend today. You’re a good person.” He remained rigid, clearly very uncomfortable. It was almost funny. Nothing about the horrors of the day had seemed to faze him, but one small gesture of affection had frozen him like a doomed deer.

“Like your pa?” he asked after a long, tense moment. Sansa laughed too sharply.

“Kinda. Not really." She touched his arm experimentally, settling her hand in the crook of his elbow. "I thought you said I was pretty?"

"You're in high school," he muttered. 

"All of a sudden you got an awful strict moral code, Officer Clegane," Sansa retorted haughtily. Under the dapples of light that the tree cast over her face, she was blushing a humiliated red. 

"You're in high school and you're probably a virgin." He started the car up again without ever looking at her. Sansa snatched her hand back and scooted back over to her half of the car, fuming, barely choking back her half-drunk-half-mad-tears. 

"I don't recall askin' you to fuck me." She pressed her face to the window, facing resolutely away from him. He stomped on the gas pedal. Nobody spoke a word the entire way back to the Stark house. He let her out half a mile down the road to avoid being spotted by Cat or the kids and drove off without ever breaking the silence. As soon as he was out of sight, Clegane drew back and hit the steering wheel as hard as he could with his open palm, once, twice, three times, cursing himself aloud. 

*

Now might be a useful time to talk about the general nature of Winter Holler and the people who lived there. Winter Holler was an insular community. Outsiders usually meant a.) religious folk and/or ambitious college students trying to do charity work, b.) drug addicts from the next state over who had somehow accidentally smoked or snorted their way over the border, or c.) cops and/or narcs. The same people were born, grew up, and died together. They remembered every individual who had ever left and mourned them as they mourned the dead. They lost one or two young people every year to the armed forces, and maybe a couple ran away or somehow finagled their way into college, but that was pretty much it. Nobody in, nobody out. 

That was what made Robb Stark’s Uptown Girl so noteworthy and so dangerous. Some said she was sure to narc. Some were just plain embarrassed for a clearly well-off nurse from the city to see them in their ancestral habitat. Either way, both groups agreed that she was distracting Ned Stark’s son from doing his damned job. The whole affair struck a deep chord in the community. Robb was the holler’s native son, the quintessential West Virginian golden boy: handsome, athletic, religious, and not afraid to shoot a motherfucker if said motherfucker needed shooting. The fact that he had chosen an outsider for his mate was appalling. Talisa was hardly the West Virginian ideal. She spoke the Queen’s proper English, loudly, with no accent. She was vaguely foreign-looking, which was not a plus amongst the strictly white residents of Winter Holler. She tended to wrinkle her nose at things that everybody else thought were perfectly fine, like squirrel meat and moonshine. Tensions were mounting, and this city-slicker diva strutting the streets without an invitation was not helping anybody’s mood. 

The Health Wagon packed up and moved on out, but the little nurse did not go with it. She could be found tiptoeing around under Cat's glare at the Stark house or quite obviously enjoying the novelty of "slumming it" at the local bar. It was only a week more before Robb announced to his mother that Talisa was pregnant and he would, of course, be doing the honorable thing and marrying her. Cat cried and prayed. Sansa had some ideas about the wedding, all of which were shot down. It would happen at the county courthouse, strictly official, no fanfare. Cat cried some more. Robb’s bachelor party went down the next night in his truck, which remained parked in his driveway. Theon had brought some really good weed, which they smoked in silence.

“You remember when we used to jump on that old trampoline?” Robb asked suddenly, blowing out a plume of smoke with a slight cough. “Me, you, Jon, and Yara?”

“Yeah. Your mama made poor Ned take it down after I double-bounced your ass into outer fuckin’ space and you broke your arm,” Theon replied, taking the joint from his friend. 

“Yeah, I remember. You signed my cast the biggest so I would know you were sorry.”

“I ain’t sorry no more. That shit was funny.” There was silence for a moment, then Rob asked,

"Remember how we used to set off fireworks all the fuckin' time?"

"That was you, not me. You were a fuckin' weird little..." Theon squinted, struggling to find the right word. "Pyro-whatever." 

"And we used to have wrestlin' matches in your backyard because your pa didn't care if we got rough." Robb was grinning the unmistakable grin of a very stoned person, relaxed into the seat, his pupils huge.

"I put you through a table."

"Bullshit. _I_ put _you_ through a table."

"Naw. I put you through Balon's card table with the fuckin' elbow drop." Theon bent his arm and tapped his elbow twice, the universal symbol for _"this is going to go into your solar plexus."_

"Bullshit! That was me. I remember 'cause The Rock always pulled the elbow drop and I loved that guy." At the thought of Dwayne Johnson, Robb started laughing, that weird, silent belly-laughter, and then couldn't seem to stop.

"The Rock was a pussy," Theon scoffed, putting the depleted joint out in the ashtray. He hit the lever under his seat so that he could lean it back all the way and kick his feet up on the dashboard. "What the fuck is this, a bachelor party or a funeral? Why're we talkin' up the good old days like this?"

“Man, I don’t know what else to do.” Robb followed suit with his own seat. He was silent for a moment before he inevitably began to wax serious in the way that only intoxicated people can manage to be serious. “We’re brothers, you know that? We grew up together."

“I know, you fuckin’ sap.”

“Do you think I’m doin’ the right thing?” Theon turned his head to the side to that he could look at his friend, who all of a sudden looked much younger and much more earnest. He felt a stab of genuine sadness all of a sudden, though he couldn't pin down exactly why.

“Shit, man, I dunno. This whole thing's crazy. I always kinda thought I would be the one havin' the shotgun wedding, not you. Do you, like…love her?”

“I think so, yeah. She’s different from anyone I ever met. She’s a good person.” Robb squinted at the truck's ceiling like a patient on a therapist's divan. 

“I don’t see how it could be wrong. What about the baby?”

“I think I’m gonna like bein’ a daddy.” Robb smiled to himself. “I think I’m gonna be good at it. Look, man, I know I said I wasn’t gonna leave until my brothers and sisters were gone, but…I dunno. What if I gotta? For this kid?” So this was the real problem. This was why Stark was reminiscing about their shared youth. He was leaving. Part of Theon desperately wanted to hug him and ask him not to go, to stay and help to sort out all the things that were going so horrifically wrong, but he knew that was selfish. Robb Stark had always deserved better than Winter Holler.

“Ain’t nobody would blame you, man. Not me, that's for sure."

All of a sudden, a tap at the window made both of them jump. Talisa was hovering just outside the truck, a panicked expression on her face. Robb sat up and rolled down the window, which allowed a generous cloud of pot smoke to roll out of the car's interior and envelop his bride-to-be. She blinked and coughed, stunned.

"Sorry, baby. What's up?" Robb leaned out of the window.

"Robb, I can't be alone with your mother anymore," the woman said tensely, folding her arms and trying not to look at Theon. "Please come inside."

"Calm your tits, Nurse Ratched. Cat's harmless," Theon muttered. She glared at him over Robb's shoulder.

"She keeps getting my name wrong on purpose and asking me if I'm absolutely sure you're the father of our child."

"Oh, for Christ's sake. I'm comin' in. Sorry, man. I'll see you soon, right?" He and Theon bro-hugged and got out of the truck. Theon got back in his own car, but he didn't leave, not until he had watched pretty, non-trashy Talisa and charming, good-hearted Robb walk back into the lit-up farmhouse hand in hand. For one, brief, rage-red moment, he hated both of them so intensely that it made his stomach hurt.

*

A Phone Conversation Between Roose and Ramsay Bolton:

“Where you at right now, boy?” 

“What for?” 

“You seen that Stark idjit around with the nurse from the Health Wagon?”

“What’s that got to do with any fuckin’ thing?” 

“Kid’s got his head so far up his ass that no-one’ll ever be able to pull it out now. I got a call yesterday from old man Lannister.”

“Yeah? What about?”

“I’ll tell you later. Where you at?”

“Jesus, pa, nowhere.”

“You fuckin’ around with Balon Greyjoy’s idjit son again? I swear to God, boy, if you don’t stop all this faggin’ around—” 

_Click._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think it was during this chapter that I realized just how deeply unsexy my writing is. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ I appreciate you reading my unsexy bullshit for four chapters.


	5. The Wedding That Nobody Actually Made It To (Because They All Got Murdered on the Way)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something is rotten in the state of West Virginia.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let’s rip it off like a band-aid. This chapter is shorter than the others because I wanted to give these murder shenanigans their own chapter. There’s a lot of cliffhangers, which will be taken care of next time on _Hillbilly GoT Soap Opera Fun-Time._

It was 9:43 A.M. on a Tuesday morning when Cat Stark’s van was run off the country road that led down the mountain. A truck coming the other direction had drifted into her lane until she had been forced to pull off onto the gravel of the shoulder to avoid a head-on collision. The attackers had chosen a secluded location, a stretch of dirt track that boasted little traffic and that traveled through a heavy, shady forest of dense old pines. There was nobody around for miles to hear the gunshots. 

Cat had been shot through the driver’s side window from a distance to prevent her from stepping on the gas and making an escape. There was a small, perfectly round hole in the glass surrounded by a halo of spider-cracks. The bullet had entered her temple and exploded out the other side. In life, Cat had always been an extraordinarily pale woman, but in death, she was so pale that her skin was tinged an inhuman blue. She had died with her mouth and her eyes wide open. Blood had soaked into her graying red hair, into her white blouse, into her long jean skirt, and was drying into something gummy and black and foul.

Robb and Talisa had been dragged out of the backseat and killed outside. The sliding door had been left agape. Robb had been armed, as he always was, but it was clear that he hadn’t been able to make any meaningful use of his gun. It was lying in the dirt about a foot from his hand, unfired. Ned Stark’s heir had met his father’s fate. He had been shot in the face at point-blank range. Nothing much remained of his handsome features; all the flesh and bone and muscle had folded in around the bullets and collapsed into mush. The dirt beside his boots was disturbed as if he had been scrambling away from his executioner, or perhaps the grooves in the ground had been made when his legs had given one final post-mortem jerk. Beside him, his bride-to-be had died a somewhat slower death. Talisa had been shot three times in the gut. She was sure to have lain there for a good while, struggling to breathe, becoming lighter and lighter as she bled out. She was curled into a ball around her wounds, the ground beneath her soaked with gore. It was an outsider’s death, fittingly brutal.

The three corpses in and around their stranded van cut a grim tableau, covered in fat midday flies, stiffening with rigor mortis, their absence as yet unnoticed. It wasn’t clear yet whether they had been left there by a careless assassin or as a warning to anyone else who might have been thinking about tampering with the power dynamic in Winter Holler, but either way, the message was clear: there was no escaping, not for anyone, not ever.

*

Sansa had wanted to be there for her brother’s wedding, but Cat had insisted that she wouldn’t drag Brandon and Ricky along for the two hour drive down to Union just for a courthouse wedding when they only needed one witness. 

“Aw, mama, can’t Nan watch ‘em?” Sansa had whined, trailing her mother around the farmhouse as she bustled about, gathering the things she would need for the day-trip. “I wanna come.”

“It’s a school day, Sansa,” Cat had replied absently. “You already missed enough school. We’ll be back tonight. Hurry up, Tanya, we gotta scoot!” This last part was hollered up the stairs, where Talisa was undoubtedly hiding in Robb’s room and sulking, trying to avoid Cat as much as she possibly could before she was stuck in the car for hours on end with the older woman.

“Her name ain’t Tanya, mama,” Robb called from the top of the stairs, managing to sound jovial despite the frequency which with he had to repeat his fiancee's name. “You know that.” He thumped down the stairs, dressed as he would be dressed for any other day. Sansa had narrowed her eyes. If _she_ had been invited, she wouldn’t have let her brother get married in jeans, a flannel, work boots, and a baseball hat, but nobody had asked her opinion on the subject. She took a brisk bite of banana to silence herself.

“Oh, Robb,” Cat had sighed tragically, shaking her head and stroking her eldest child’s bristly cheek. “I haven’t known her long enough to know what her name is.” A collective groan went up from nearly every room in the house. The whole family was heartily sick of the woman’s dramatics.

So while Cat was still trying to wrangle the lovebirds into her van with all the necessary forms and certificates, Sansa herded her younger siblings onto the school bus that would take them to their elementary school and then took Robb’s truck to the high school. It was about half an hour away, in the next town over, which was one of the reasons why everybody dropped out. No school buses came out as far as the holler, not for the high-schoolers, and if a kid couldn’t drive or didn’t have a car or a friend, they were basically shit out of luck. Of course, some dropped out because they had to get a full-time job to support their family, or because they were pregnant, or because they were addicted to drugs. Some just dropped out because they couldn’t be bothered to give a damn anymore. Sansa was starting to understand that particular point-of-view.

She had always been a straight-A student, but since her father had been murdered, her grades had begun to slip. There were suddenly much scarier things in the world than an F. She had avoided truancy only because her teachers felt sorry for her. Her senior year was halfway over, but dropping out was looking more and more appealing. Both of her older brothers had graduated at the top of their class, but Sansa was beginning to realize that she wasn’t much like her brothers.

She parked beside the school, Robb’s truck one in a sea of pick-ups, some old, some new, some muddy, some clean, some with massive monster-truck wheels, some low to the ground. She was just getting her backpack out of the passenger’s side when she spotted Maggie across the lot, leaning against one very familiar pick-up. As Sansa watched, Joff got out of the driver’s side, strolled around the front, and started to tongue-punch Maggie Tyrell’s face right there in the middle of the parking lot. 

“You gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’ me,” Sansa said under her breath. She thought about just getting back in the truck and going home, but it was too late: they had already spotted her. Maggie was waving, smiling as if nothing was wrong, but Sansa did not wave back. She shouldered her bag and walked as fast as she could into the school. 

Sansa spent the entire day trying to lay as low as possible. She didn’t answer questions in class like she usually did, she didn’t sit with Maggie and her gaggle of giggling, screaming cousins at lunch like she usually did, and she skipped gym class completely, as the thought of running laps around the track made her want to throw up. When the bell finally rang at 2:15, she all but ran out to the truck. She was the first one out of the parking lot.

The girl didn’t know why it bothered her so much that Joff and Maggie were dating. She had obviously had more than enough of Joff’s companionship, and all her conversations with Maggie had been so superficial for so long that she wasn’t even sure they were friends anymore. It finally occurred to her when she was halfway home: she couldn’t stand the thought of the two of them talking about her, laughing at her, telling stories about her. They had no right. Neither of them really knew her, and now she was sure that neither of them had never really liked her, either. This realization burned quietly in the back of her throat. Sansa Stark was just about out of friends and allies. 

Once home, Sansa made dinner for the kids—macaroni and cheese, obviously—and settled in on the couch to do homework, watch TV, and make sure that Arya, Brandon, and Ricky didn’t kill each other. She made Arya take her BB gun outside. _“No shooting in the house!”_ She made Ricky sit down beside her and do his math homework. _“I don’t remember the times tables, you’re gonna have to ask Arya when she comes in.”_ She made Brandon eat a second bowl of macaroni. _“Stop mopin’ around and go play with the dogs or somethin’.”_ She didn’t start getting worried until it started getting dark.

The brisk knock on the door at 7:30 didn’t do anything to assuage her fears. 

“I got it!” all three kids yelled in tandem as the dogs barked, excited for company. Sansa stood up, put her books aside, and waved her hand at all three of them to go back to what they had been doing. 

“I got it. Mama probably forgot her keys again.” But when she opened the door, it wasn’t Cat standing at the doorstep; it was Officer Sandor Clegane, uniform, badge, gun, and all.

“I wanted to tell you myself,” he said quickly before she could open her mouth. 

“Tell me what?” Sansa asked, folding her arms and scowling. After her humiliation in the truck, she had hoped never to see this particular police officer again. She had stopped short of deleting the station’s number from her phone, but she hadn’t been itching to call, either. She could feel her macaroni shifting queasily in her stomach. Clegane grimaced.

“Sansa, your mama, your brother, and his girl got jumped just outside town this mornin’. They got shot. Wasn’t my jurisdiction, but I went down there anyway. Just to see.”

“Are they gonna be okay?” She knew this was a foolish question. If they were okay, they would have called her. But it was all she could think to say in the blinding numbness of the white wave of denial that swept over her mind. His grimace deepened.

“All of ‘em died at the scene. I’m real sorry.” 

“Sansa, who is it?” Arya whined, bumping her sister aside so she, too, could see their visitor. She made a face. “Who’re you?”

“I’m a police officer.”

“Well, duh.” Arya rolled her eyes. She glanced at Sansa for some insight, but the older girl was sheet-white, glassy-eyed, tight-mouthed, looking at the ground. “Sansa? What’s wrong?”

“Go inside, Arya,” Sansa said softly. “Get Officer Clegane a bowl of macaroni.” She looked up at the bearer of the bad news with a surprising amount of authority. “Come on in, alright?” He hesitated for a minute, but then nodded and stepped across the threshold. 

“Alright.”

*

At just about 9:43 A.M., Theon was fourteen hours into an epic crank binge, just pausing the day’s planned activities to refuel. His bedroom was already a cyclonic disaster; the rickety old bed was an island in a sea of clothes, trash, and other junk; the blinds were drawn and the lights were off. The only illumination came from the inconsistent flickering of the TV, which had been functioning wonderfully ever since he had paid the cable bill, muted and displaying Seinfeld and all his wacky buddies. Theon and Ramsay were both wearing pajama pants that they had found someplace on the floor. The whole scene looked some sort of bizarre drug-fueled sleepover. From the floor beside the bed, Theon’s cell-phone began to ring, an irritating, high-pitched jangle. Ramsay kicked it across the room into a pile of dirty clothes.

“What if it’s important?” Theon asked in a lackadaisical way that made it clear that he hadn’t been about to answer the damn thing anyway. The phone continued ringing, muffled by a pair of jeans, until it gave up and sent the poor bastard to voicemail.

“It ain’t,” Ramsay replied. “It’s always Robb Stark bitchin’ and moanin’, wantin’ to talk about his _feelings._ ”

“He’s gettin’ married today,” Theon said, a little wistfully. He was absorbed in the origami-like art of creating a tinfoil runner. If it was too thin, the lighter would burn right through it, but if it was too thick, the crystals wouldn’t melt all the way. If it wasn’t shaped correctly the melted ice would trickle right off the end. Luckily, he was a pro. In a matter of minutes, he had a perfect little aluminum canoe.

“Good for him,” Ramsay said in a way that made it clear that he actually didn’t give a fuck. Theon reached into the little baggie on the nightstand and lined up a few cloudy white rocks of crank on the runner. Not too much, not too little. The whole affair was very _Goldilocks_ in nature.

“Here,” Theon said, thrusting the lighter at the other man. He was sure he already looked like shit—his hair was getting too long and it was wild, he hadn’t shaved in a while, and wait, was that Stewie Griffin on the pants he was wearing? why did he even own Stewie Griffin pajama pants?—but he was content with the knowledge that in a minute or so, he wouldn’t care what he looked like anymore. 

Ramsay was a good meth-smoking buddy. He always let the other person go first, and he always held the lighter for them. He was a great lighter-holder. He had learned how way before he had ever touched ice himself; sometimes the various fiends and freaks who always seemed to be crashing on Roose’s couch had needed a hand. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. You had to move the lighter underneath the foil fast, but not too fast, melting the meth evenly; you had to know when to stop. After a moment, white smoke would begin to curl off of the melted drug, which would be inhaled by the smoker through something long and thin—Theon’s tool of choice was a pen that he had taken all the guts out of, leaving only a hollow plastic tube. This was repeated on the other side. Then Theon would pass the pen to Ramsay, who always insisted on holding his own lighter. This, Theon had decided long ago, was because he had trust issues and didn’t think anybody else could do it the right way. If you can’t commit to somebody else holding your lighter while you smoke crystal meth, what _can_ you commit to?

It only took a few minutes for the euphoric effects to hit hard, both physically and psychologically. Meth is well known for something fancy people call “emotional blunting.” Unpleasant feelings, painful memories, embarrassment, self-hatred, fear—all gone, replaced by a high-intensity brain-party that lasted for hours and wouldn’t seem like a bad idea until much, much later. 

They spent a few moments lying on their backs side by side, feeling great, before Ramsay sat up, leaned over Theon, and asked,

“You jealous?”

“What?” Theon focused his eyes on the other man’s face with some difficulty. 

“You said Stark’s gettin’ married today. You jealous of him?”

“Naw,” Theon replied with a crooked smile. “Married people don’t fuck.”

“They don’t, do they?” Ramsay grinned. He leaned down for a kiss, all clumsy tongue and teeth and spit, but drugs made romance unnecessary. Everything felt like lightening, no matter how coarse. “Remember this?” He touched a somewhat fresh, vaguely hand-shaped bruise that spanned Theon’s neck, a classic, no-frills choke-out-mark. 

“Yeah, I think I remember that,” Theon replied with a laugh. He also remembered having liked it, adding “erotic asphyxiation” to the list of things he would never tell anybody that he enjoyed. Ramsay laughed as well, although Theon was not at all sure they were laughing for the same reasons.

“I’m gonna do it again.”

Theon didn’t check his voicemail until the next day. It wasn’t unusual to get a couple voicemails from Robb during a meth-induced fuck-a-thon, usually asking where the hell he was, what the hell he was doing, who the hell he was doing, and when he was going to be coming back. He thought nothing of it when he fished his phone out from under the jeans, plugged it in, put it on speaker, and hit play. Immediately, the sounds of an engine revving and a woman screaming filled the dim bedroom. 

“Okay, I couldn’t call the cops, the cops can’t help, so I hope you get this,” Robb’s voice said, strained and hushed. “Somebody’s tryin’ to run us off the road. We’re on County Line Road headed out of town. I can’t tell how many people there are in the truck. Fuck, man, I think they got guns, I got my .45 but it don’t hold too many rounds—I don’t know if I can get ‘em.” Just then, the call was splintered by an explosive gunshot. Robb must have dropped the phone. There was screaming, men shouting, shuffling, banging—and then the call cut off. 

Theon sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in his hand staring off into space for a long time, his jaw quivering like he was just about to scream.


	6. G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Murder. Sex. Pasta. Drugs. Cats. Rock’n’Roll. Lesbians. The apocalypse. Horses. Orphans. Metaphors. Crumbling marriages. Bureaucracy. Stop me when you've heard enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to thank everyone who's been reading/reviewing/leaving kudos! Y'all make me smile! Apologies for the wait. I either have all the free time in the world or none at all, apparently.

Sandor had stepped straight into Starkmageddon. It had begun quietly enough; Arya was busy scraping some macaroni off the bottom of the pot for their visitor, the two boys had been ordered to shut up and do their homework, and Sansa herself had immediately gotten on the phone to her Uncle Ben, an ailing Army veteran who lived in the city. She had locked herself in the bathroom to speak with him privately, leaving Sandor alone with the oblivious Ricky, still immersed in his times tables, and the more astute Arya and Brandon, who were both looking alternately at him, at one another, and at the doorway that led to the hall and beyond, the locked bathroom, from within which Sansa’s muffled voice could be heard. When her stilted conversation with Uncle Ben was over, she called Crazy Aunt Lysa, Uncle Jon’s widow, who had since up and moved to one of the Carolinas. Both of them were crushed, obviously, by the deaths of Robb, Cat, and What’s-Her-Name, yet both declined to come down to help with the funeral. They both asked her if she had called Jon yet. They seemed to think that Jon could take care of it.

“Here,” Arya deadpanned, plunking the bowl full of lukewarm macaroni in front of the cop, her square face set. “What’d you say to my sister?”

“What kind of macaroni is this?” He didn't know what the hell else to say to her. He picked at the rubbery pasta with the fork she had stabbed into the contents of the bowl. Arya scowled.

"I dunno. Who cares?" The girl sat down across the table from him and leaned forward on her elbows, glaring him down. Sandor was starting to feel a little bit like he was being interrogated by a hardened detective. “What’d you say to Sansa? Where’s mama?” The man ignored her as completely as he could manage and shoveled a huge forkful of macaroni into his mouth. He made a point of looking everywhere in the kitchen except at Arya Stark. The room was tastefully decorated. Homey, with intentionally weathered prints of chickens and eggs on the walls, old tea-kettles that had never been used prominently displayed, and other similar, frivolous detritus. An inspirational message painted on a small, decorative plank of wood hanging on the wall read, _God Bless This Mess!_ It took Sansa five obnoxious bites of macaroni to emerge from the bathroom, still white as a sheet, her phone dangling at her side. Four heads whipped simultaneously in her direction.

"What's goin' on?" Arya asked immediately. Sansa opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out. Sandor had once believed strongly in a merciful God who rewards suffering, as most disadvantaged or disabled people do at some point in their lives, but as he watched trying to Sansa prepare herself to give her little brothers and sister the worst news of their lives, the possibility that a loving and just God existed seemed more remote than ever. There was no heavenly reward satisfying enough to justify the things that had been happening in the holler since Ned Stark's death had upset a very important equilibrium. Suddenly, Sandor knew what he had to do. 

“Welp, kids, I came to give your big sister some bad news,” he said abruptly, pushing his chair back from the table. “Your mama and your brother got into an accident today. They didn’t make it.” Sansa looked simultaneously horrified and relieved. The ensuing hullabaloo was enough to make anybody wish that they had never gotten out of bed. All three children immediately demanded of their sister whether or not this was true, and when she confirmed the news with a small nod, there was no group-hug, no gentle weeping, and no promises that everything was going to be okay. There was just screaming. More than one breakable thing was broken against the wall or against the floor. Sansa didn't have the power or the desire to tame the wailing; she just had to wait it out, then try to collect the bits and pieces of the three little people whose lives she now held very tangibly in her hands. She was very aware that she had no authority to do this; the only thing she knew to do was take them next door, to Nan's house, leaving Sandor standing in the kitchen with a half-eaten bowl of macaroni and a bad taste in his mouth. It could have been fifteen minutes or an hour; he didn't know how long it took for her to come back, but when she did, she hovered in the doorway, taking in the wreck, the broken glass, the dinner-mess, with eyes that saw none of it.

“The kids are gonna stay with Nan tonight,” Sansa said hoarsely, scrubbing at her already-raw face with her sleeve.

“Where you stayin’?” Sandor asked. He did not know why he gave a shit about Sansa Stark and Sansa Stark's problems, of which there were quite a few. He had his own problems. He had his job, his second, less legal job, both employers breathing down his neck, one threatening to can him and the other threatening to shoot the good half of his face off. He had his Leaving West Virginia Fund to supplement. He had his asshole brother. He had normal adult problems like taxes and back pain. Sandor Clegane had plenty of problems, and yet here he was taking care of someone else's. Trying, anyway. Failing, mostly.

“Here. So I can think about what to do next.” Sansa hesitated, leaning her head against the door frame. “Will you stay with me?” It was his turn to hesitate. She had such big eyes. Eyes like that should have been illegal. The only things Sandor could think to compare them to were the eyes on his goat, Apples. Apples' eyes weren't green like Sansa's, but they were big and shiny and wet and even kind of soulful when she was hungry. Those goat-eyes really got to him.

“Alright," he finally agreed. Sansa nodded and made an immediate beeline for the pantry, where she took down an unopened bottle of Southern Comfort from the highest shelf. None of the alcohol in the house had been touched by a legal adult since Ned's death; Cat had been a good Mormon up until the end.

“Don’t lecture me, alright?" she asked, her tone tired and pleading. "Not tonight.” Sandor internally added "drinking problem" to the list of Sansa Stark's problems that definitely weren't his fucking problems. They sat on opposite ends of the couch and passed the bottle back and forth, Sansa staring off into her own grief, Sandor staring at the Stark family pictures on the walls. They were all strangely formal. School pictures of the kids. Sports portraits of Robb and Jon. Awkward braces-faced frizzy-haired middle-school Sansa. Baby pictures. Wedding photos of Ned and Cat, the bride's hair big and feathered, the groom with an embarrassing handlebar mustache. Family things. Sandor's family had never been big on family things. He resented the Starks for their normality and he resented that most of them were dead. Finally, when she was good and toasted, Sansa said, 

“Wanna know what I was just thinkin’ about for some reason?” She scooted across the couch until she was right next to him, holding the bottle right under her chin as if it were a microphone, her eyes shining. “I was thinkin' about horses."

"Horses?" he prompted, taking the bottle from her and keeping it. She had clearly had enough.

"Yeah. My grandpa had horses when I was a little girl. One was this beautiful white mare, Roxanna. I wanted to ride her so bad. But she was too fuckin' mean and wild to get on, accordin' to my mama. I had to ride Nellie. She was slow and fat and all she ever wanted to do was eat. We never went faster than a trot. My mama would watch from the porch, screamin' at me to hold on tight while Nellie was hardly movin'. She was so damn worried about me all the time."

"She was right to be worried about you. This world's a fucked up place."

"Yeah." She sat there for a moment, staring off into space again, picking at the label of the bottle with her fingernails, her eyebrows furrowed, until he plucked up the courage to say the most romantic thing he could think of

"You're Roxanna."

"What?"

"You’re a Roxanna. You’re beautiful and kinda mean and kinda wild and it’s better to just let a Roxanna go. Get yourself a Nellie.” Sandor took a deep sip of the whiskey-flavored whatever it was, feeling very profound. He should have known that Sansa wasn't going to let him get away with it.

“That’s dumb,” she protested, smacking him in the chest. “That is so unbelievably fuckin’ dumb that I can't even believe it. I’m not a fuckin’ horse. I’m just a fucked up girl with a fucked up life and you’re just a fucked up guy with a fucked up face and a fucked up job and you’re fuckin’ me up right now. Just fuckin’ kiss me.” He kissed her, alright. And then all of Cat's immaculate throw pillows were on the floor and he had a fistful of red ponytail, and she was on his lap. She worked quick. Sansa wiggled out of her shirt and manhandled his uniform shirt open. She was eighteen years old and she still matched her bra to her panties. He slid his rough fingers under her skirt and over the polka-dotted cotton, feeling the whorls and layers and dampness and darkness beneath, wondering what he could have possibly done in his life or any of his past lives to deserve this limber young woman crawling all over him. She pressed her face against his neck. He did not mark the exact moment when her heaving breathing turned into tears, but as soon as he felt the wetness against his neck, he stopped what he was doing and wrapped his arms around her.

“I’m scared,” she sobbed. “I’m so scared. I don’t know what’s gonna happen to me. I don’t know what to do.”

“I know, little girl. I know.”

Sansa woke up alone on the couch with an afghan wrapped around her and a powerful, throbbing hangover. Her eyes focused on her shirt, white, crumpled on the floor. She squinted at it, her mind slow to process what the fuck she was looking at and what the fuck had happened the night before. Her phone was ringing; that was what had awoken her. It was Theon. Last time her phone had rung displaying that particular contact, she had been invited to a cleaning-up-body-parts-in-the-woods brunch, but she answered anyway. It was her duty as his fag hag. 

Alright, gang, we've becoming pretty good at time-warping, haven't we? I think we have. The author has not improved upon her transitioning skills, but the audience has really adapted to all of the erratic leaps in time and space she had required of them. Let's do it again. We don't have to time-warp very far this time. Just a little further back that morning to check up on Theon post-answering-machine-debacle. 

*

When Ramsay came back from the bathroom, Theon was waiting for him. Ostensibly, nothing had changed. The window was still open. He could still hear the birds on the lake, the faraway sputter of somebody’s boat motor, the fisherman’s radio playing something twangy. The breeze still smelled like spring. Seinfeld’s antics had been replaced by those of the _Friends_ gang on the television. Half an hour ago, he had been giving jaw-breaking head on a bare mattress in a world that still had everyone he cared about in it. Theon felt like he was going to explode.

“Did you know this was gonna happen?” he asked, sounding winded, as if he had been the one who had been shot, thrusting the phone at the other man as if the proof of the crime was visible there.

“Did I know what was gonna happen?” Ramsay leaned against the doorway, frowning down at his arm, where he was picking at a deep red scab with his blunt fingernails. If you asked him, he was definitely not getting meth bugs, but if you asked anyone else, they would probably screw up their face, grudgingly nod, and admit that it kinda looked like he was starting to get meth bugs.

“They shot Robb.” Theon managed this through gritted teeth, dropping the phone onto the bed. “Fuck, man, they shot him and probably Talisa, too. I heard her screaming.”

“Whoa, whoa.” Ramsay looked more confused than concerned. “Who’s ‘they’?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know. You tell me.” Theon leveraged himself jerkily to his feet and stood toe-to-toe with the other man, all meth-agitated, sweating, seeing colors. 

“Listen,” Ramsay sighed, condescending, taking Theon by the shoulders as if to ground him. “My pa said he was sendin’ some fuckin’ goons down there to scare ‘im off. You know Stark weren’t fuckin’ cut out for this. Ain’t nobody said nothin’ about shootin’ the fuckin’ kid. He's probably fine."

“Fuck you. I don’t believe you.” He pushed the larger man away, something he normally never would have done. Retribution was swift and furious. Ramsay’s arm shot out with alarming speed, a rushed, unplanned clobbering motion that caught Theon right in the jaw.

“Don’t fuckin’ put your hands on me," Ramsay said, sounding exasperated, shaking his hand out. Theon experienced a strange moment of endorphin-giddy glee. He spit his bothersome tooth into his hand along with a gob of bloody saliva. They both stared at it for a moment as you might stare at a newborn child or a recently dead person.

“Put it in milk,” Ramsay instructed dispassionately, grabbing his coat from the top of one of the piles of clothes on the floors.

“Where you goin’?” Theon slurred through his mouthful of blood. 

“To talk to my pa. I’ll be back.”

Two Phone Calls Made Within Five Minutes of Each Other, Transcribed Here in Dramatic Script Form:

I.

THEON: Um, hey. _(voice hollow)_ Are you okay?

SANSA: You heard? About Robb and Talisa and mama?

T: Yeah, I heard. I heard they got shot. 

S: Yeah. _(pause)_

T: You need me...to come down there? Or anythin'?

S: Maybe later. Maybe tomorrow. I dunno. I gotta...plan the funeral.

T: Okay. _(pause for several beats)_ I just wanted to see how you were.

S: Not good. I'll talk to you later, Theon. _(she hangs up the phone)_

II. 

THEON: Yara?

YARA: Theon? What is it? Is dad dead?

T: It’s Robb.

Y: Robb? _Robb’s_ dead?

T: And Ned. And Cat.

Y: Christ. 

T: Can you come home? For a visit?

Y: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got some leave saved up. I can come for a little while. Listen, are you high right now? Because I swear to God I’m gonna fuckin’ destroy—

T: _(cutting her off)_ Thanks, Yara. I’ll see you soon. _(he hangs up the phone)_

It was a couple of hours before Ramsay came back, crashing pretty hard, with blood under his fingernails.

“You get in a fight?” Theon asked, offering him a handful of OxyContin. He was sitting on the couch with his disembodied tooth in a glass full of milk on the coffee table in front of him as if he had been meditating on it. In reality, he was just too zapped out on painkillers to be bothered to look anyplace else but the vaguely bloody milk. Downers eased the transition from "tweaking meth freak" to "normal, functioning human being" as well as anything could. It was still daylight outside, but the inside of the house was twilight. 

“I think I killed him.” Ramsay seemed very calm about this. He plopped down casually on the couch. 

“You wanna talk about it?” Theon was slurring. He let his head drop onto the other man’s shoulder. He was not looking forward to waking up and handling all of this, all of everything, all the dead people and his missing tooth and the people who still remained.

“Nope.” Ramsay tossed back the pills as if they were Skittles and chased them down with a swig of a beer that had been sitting half-drank on the table for God knew how long. He closed his eyes, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and then promptly forgot to light it. “Nope.”

Back at the trailer, the dogs in the pen attached to the side were losing it. They were largely ignoring the entire bag of dog food that Ramsay had dumped unceremoniously in and around their various bowls; instead, they were all crowded up to one edge of the chain-link fence, barking furiously at the gut-shot corpse on the other side.

*

As soon as he was notified of the death of the last legal guardian who could or would look after Brandon, Arya, and Ricky, Jon Stark was honorably discharged from the United States Army on grounds of bereavement so that he could return home and care for his brand new brood of dependents. He was not particularly excited to go, but he wasn’t particularly inclined to stay, either. The Army had been his only choice at eighteen, but now he was a grown-ass man with grown-ass choices to make and grown-ass veteran’s benefits to keep him afloat while he made those choices. He loved his younger siblings. He really did. He did not think he was particularly capable of taking care of them, but what the hell. It was worth a shot. The thought of Cat Stark rolling in her grave while he raised her children made it more than worth it. 

On a scale of child abuse taking into account the lasting psychological effects as well as actual physical damage inflicted, placing the Stark kids at the bottom, Ramsay Bolton at the top, and Theon somewhere in the middle, Jon fell somewhere in between his siblings and the Greyjoys. Cat Stark had been a sweet, loving, and protective, if overbearing, mother to all of her biological children, but she had taken out all the pent-up rage she kept inside for the sake of the other five on Jon. Whenever he was unfortunate enough to cross her path, she always came up with something to scream at him about, something to sigh and roll her eyes at him over, something to ground him for. Since she considered herself too motherly and moral to strike a child, her signature move was the Cat Stark Squeeze-N-Shake. When truly in a rage, she would grab young Jon by the arm, squeeze hard enough to hurt, and shake until he couldn't see straight. This was her patented punishment until the boy got big and strong enough to tear himself out of her iron grip, run away, and wait out the storm.

Sansa had plenty of time to think about the turbulent childhood Jon had lived right next to her smooth, unblemished one as she drove Robb’s truck all the way down to Charleston to pick her brother up from the airport. She had never liked to watch her mother shake Jon around like a dark-haired Raggedy Andy. When she had been very little, she had just been glad that it wasn’t her getting whipped around the kitchen, but as she got older, she had started to feel a vague sense of injustice. Of course, she had never been brave enough to tell Cat to stop it, and she had never known why her mother hated her brother so much. She still didn’t, really. In Appalachia, family was an amorphous affair that could and often did include cousins who were interchangeable with siblings, grandparents who acted like parents, aunts and uncles who were just as close to you as your mother and father, half-siblings, step-siblings, family friends who were informally adopted into the clan…the only reason Cat would have to hate Jon so much was the improbable, frankly unimaginable case of Ned’s infidelity. Now it was too late for Sansa to ask. Not that she would ever have asked. Sometimes she was afraid that she was a coward and that she would always be that way.

The young woman waited at the baggage claim, understandably expecting to be greeted by the older brother that she hadn’t seen in years. Instead, a short, intensely muscled woman with a severe army-style bun at the base of her neck and a crazy smile bounded over.

“Hey, baby girl!” the redhead exclaimed, heaving a stuffed army-green knapsack over her shoulder as if it weighed nothing. 

“Oh, hi!” Sansa managed, sounding strained and inauthentic. She had no idea who this person was. She searched the backlogs of her memory frantically but came up with nothing.

“I know, I know, I bet he didn’t even tell you I was coming," the woman in front of her sighed, casting a conspiratorially glance back at the baggage carousel, where Jon was still waiting for his luggage. "I bet he didn’t even tell you my name. He don’t tell anybody anything.” She had one of those open-O, hard-A Midwestern accents that Sansa couldn’t quite place. “I’m Ygritte. Your sister-in-law. Sur-fuckin’-prise, am I right?”

"Oh my gosh, of course!" Sansa exclaimed, both embarrassed and relieved. "It's so good to meet you. Robb told me that you guys got married, but you're right, I had no idea you were comin'." Ygritte threw her head back and let out a manic cackle.

"Figures. Men." Let's take an aside for a just moment to identify this person's origin and intentions. Ygritte had been born in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the winters were brutal, the summers were short, and the job market was shit. She came from a big happy family of doomsday preppers, which, in that part of the world, weren’t as rare as one might think. Off-the-grid, food-hoarding, militia-drill-running, gun-shooting, home-birthing, self-sustaining hermits tended to flock to places where they would be allowed to pursue their chosen lifestyle in peace. The skillset that the U.S. Army offered was highly prized in the doomsday prepper community. Most of Ygritte’s brothers, sisters, and cousins had been shunted off into the armed forces in much the same manner that she had, armed with a powerful distrust of authority and a powerful fear of the apocalypse. Like most people who are brought up under the ever-looming threat of the end of days, Ygritte was just a little bit intense. She loved people and hated them with the same feverish intensity; there was no time for anything else. 

Jon appeared a moment later, lugging a similar rucksack. He had not changed very much, except for the ugly cropped haircut the Army had given him, the tan, and the air of authority he carried.

“C’mere.” He pulled Sansa into a hug. “I’m so sorry that I wasn’t here.” 

“It ain’t your fault,” Sansa whispered, swallowing tears. “Thanks for comin’ back so fast.”

“Let’s go home, alright?" Ygritte cleared her throat. "Oh, sorry. I forgot to introduce you two. This is my wife, Ygritte.”

“Yeah, I already introduced myself." Ygritte adjusted her grip on her bag and started off toward the parking garage without a backward glance. If Sansa had been herself, she might have remarked that Jon’s marriage seemed pretty unstable, but she was not herself, and she was dog-tired, and she was more than happy to let Jon drive home. She dozed with her head back against the seat, occasionally jarred by a bump in the road, occasionally roused by Jon and Ygritte’s quiet bickering. 

“You didn’t have to come here with me.”

“Of course I had to come with you. I’m your wife. What, you think you can take care of all these kids by yourself? How dumb are you? They gave me my papers for a reason.”

“I done a lot of things by myself.” A few irritated car horns honking pulled Sansa almost entirely out of her fitful nap.

“Jesus H. Christ. You’re gonna kill us. I know you don’t care if I die today, but don't forget that your sister is in the car.” The argument dissolved into hisses and then into nothing as Sansa drifted back to sleep. The next time she woke up, they were parked in the driveway of the farmhouse in the holler. Jon was standing just in front of the truck, appraising the house he had been raised in with his hands on his hips. Stretching and popping her cramped joints, Sansa got out of the truck and stood beside him, folding her arms across her chest. She thought she should have been experiencing some grand feeling—perhaps grief or hope or terror—but she didn't really have any big feelings left to feel.

“I’m sellin’ this godforsaken shitheap," Jon said abruptly, smiling with one side of his mouth, not a very happy smile.

“Where are we gonna go?” Sansa asked, a little baffled, a little hurt. This was her childhood home, after all. Her brothers and sister were still children, still growing up there. She may not have liked West Virginia, but she had never lived anyplace else.

“The G.I. Bill is gonna pay for that. Don’t worry ‘bout it.” He hefted he and his wife's luggage out of the back of the truck. Ygritte was leaning against the side of the truck, smoking and staring with what looked to Sansa like disdain at the old house.

“He sure has a lot more faith in that fact than I do,” she muttered to Sansa, making a face. “The G.I. Bill isn’t gonna do jack shit for us.” Sansa didn't know what to say, so she just nodded.

“Is she tellin’ you about her conspiracy theories?" Jon called over his shoulder, on his way into the house. Always pressing forward. "Don’t let her get started. She’ll never stop.”

“You just ain’t woke, Jon," Ygritte hollered after him, half-joking, grinding the cigarette out under the ball of her foot. "You just ain’t woke.”

*

Let’s talk about one of the simplest concepts in modern psychology: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Every human starts at the bottom of the triangle and moves up according to their circumstances in the most unfair game of Monopoly ever devised. At the bottom exist your common Physiological Needs such as air, water, food, clothing, and shelter. Once you’ve got those, you get to move up to Personal Safety, which is where most of our hapless characters stopped progressing. The ones who managed to get past that stage stopped at the next—Love and Belonging. The last two tiers—Esteem and Self-Actualization—are fairytales as far as our story is concerned. 

Two people who exemplified this concept fairly well came into town that week: Yara Greyjoy and Dany Targaryen. They had both spent most of their lives on the run, stranded at the base of the pyramid. Yara was a severe-looking young woman with a terrible military-issue bob and all the fashion sense of the butchest lesbian in the state, which, despite no lack of trying, she probably wasn’t. Unlike her brother, she was tightly self-controlled; she had managed to wait until she had moved away from home to come out of the closet. She had never set foot in a college and had only been in the Navy for a few years, but she was already in an officer’s training program. Yara was a born leader, but her zest for military life was actually a thinly-disguised desire to get the fuck away from where she had been born and raised. The middle of the ocean was objectively the opposite of the mountains of West Virginia. 

She was just about to pick Dany up from the side of the highway, where she had been hitch-hiking into town with nothing but a canvas backpack and a cat carrier containing three very persnickety kitties. Dany looked like a Ke$ha concert had thrown up on a goth kid circa 1998. Her peroxide-bleached hair was half-dreadlocked—not on purpose, but because she hadn’t washed it in a while—and she had all the terrible tattoos, safety-pin piercings, raggedy fishnets, battered combat boots, and body glitter of a dirty street punk. She had run away from foster care a long, long time ago, and since then, she had lived several different places and made a million questionable decisions. She had been the leader of a biker gang’s ol’ lady for a couple years, until he had gotten himself popped just outside of Chicago and she had taken his bike and gotten the fuck out of dodge. She had camped out at a couple pretty unsuccessful fracking protests and dropped acid with a bunch of college kids in a bunch of national forests. A lot of men, both young and old, had tried to make her their manic pixie dream-girl to no avail. She had _not_ been a stripper in Knoxville, so stop asking. Now she was headed back to where she had been born with nothing to her name but her cats and her daddy’s famous recipe for the purest methamphetamine south of the Mason-Dixon Line, long-ago nicknamed “The Dragon.”

“Where you goin’, girl?” Yara asked, rolling down the passenger’s side window. The other woman picked up her cat carrier and sashayed over to the car, flipping her long hair over her shoulder in case she needed to show a little décolletage to get what she wanted.

“Up Winter Holler way. I’m Dany.” 

“Yara. Hop in.”

“Ass or grass?” Dany asked playfully as she climbed into the unnaturally clean rental car, grinning. She tossed her backpack into the backseat and settled the cat carrier awkwardly onto her lap. Some very dissatisfied meowing could be heard from within.

“Aw, shit, neither, darlin’,” Yara said with a wink, pulling back onto the freeway. “I won’t take nothin’ you don’t give freely.”

“Grass?” Dany nodded to the back, indicating her backpack, where she had more than enough weed for an entire commune. Yara shook her head patiently.

“I gotta take piss-tests. I’m on leave from the Navy.”

“The Navy! Ma’am yes ma’am.” Dany saluted her with a high-pitched little giggle. “You from around here, Navy girl?” Dany, Yara decided then, was a carefully-constructed layer of sticky sweetness with a hard, dark core, much like a lollipop or an expensive chocolate with a walnut in the middle. She was full of secrets, and not the good kind that melted on your tongue, either.

“I was born up the holler," she replied.

“Me too. Ain’t it a small world.”

“No shit. Dany…" She repeated the name, glancing over at the woman, trying to find any familiar features... "Hey, you ain’t Old Man Targaryen’s baby daughter, are you? Daenerys?”

“I sure am." Dany straightened her holey black t-shirt; it was not clear whether she was proud of her heritage or deeply ashamed.

“No shittin’. I was just a little girl when they sent you and your brother away. My pa didn’t get much mixed up in that shit at the time.” Yara had the advantage of distance. She could talk about her family without ever having to confront their reality. She was a self-made woman, she told herself; nothing had shaped her. She liked to pretend that her entire childhood and adolescence had befallen somebody else.

“But he did," Dany pronounced grimly. "Everybody up there does.”

“Later on. I got three brothers. Two of ‘em died pushin’ ice and the last one’s got his foot in the same fuckin’ grave. That’s why I’m headed home.” The mountains were already rising above them on the highway. Both women felt knots form in their guts at the sight of those ancient, mossy mountains.

“To save your brother from ol’ Cristy?”

“Guess that’s the big and small of it. How ‘bout you? What’s up there for you after all this time? Ain’t you got another life?”

“My dumbass brother, Lord rest his soul, was always on about how they killed our daddy and ran us out of town. I ain’t got a ton of cash right now. I figured I better go up there and see what it is he thought they took from us.” Dany thought that it was probably wise not to bring up her legendary meth recipe when Yara seemed like the militant just-say-no type. Besides...she didn't even know if she could do it. Despite her million and one questionable choices, Dany had never set foot in a meth lab, and she who was to say that she wasn't going to blow herself up the first time she tried? Just because she had the recipe didn't mean she could pull it off.

“You got anyplace to stay?” Yara asked, smiling in what some would have considered a lascivious manner.

“No ma’am.”

“You can stay with my brother and me if you like. We got a big ol’ house up there by the lake with nobody to live in it, since my pa’s runned off to God fuckin’ knows where." She glanced over at the other woman one more time and nodded at the cat carrier. "How many cats you got in that box, girl?”

“Three." Dany smiled. "They're my babies. I found 'em after their mama got hit by a semi-truck. I raised 'em from little peanuts." She unclasped the little wire door and poked her fingers in, then quickly recoiled as one of the critters inside had apparently bitten her. She glowered as Yara laughed, speeding up the uncrowded road to nothing good, still circling the bottom two halves of Maslow's godforsaken triangle. "Little fucker.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dany is Heisenberg...I guess...?


	7. Zombie Prom/Pour Some Sugar on Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ramsay finds out that you technically aren’t allowed to kill people. Dany makes a friend. Sansa has the Best Prom Ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kinda late update, but I wanted to let ya'll know that I made a Tumblr that I have literally no idea how to use. Please help me/hit me up/give me writing prompts/pity my hideous attempts at blogging(?). 
> 
> https://www.tumblr.com/blog/unejolieordure

7:15 A.M. PROM MORNING

Down Kentucky way, Sissy Lannister was tap, tap, tapping her nails on the yellow Formica of her kitchen table, chain-smoking Pall Malls in her ancient pink bathrobe while she glared resolutely at the kitchen wall. Without her makeup, she looked much, much older and much, much meaner. Across the table, her twin brother Jaime sighed deeply behind the newspaper.

“Can you please stop that?” he asked as evenly as he could. Staying on Sissy’s good side was a balancing act that he was better at than anybody else, but that wasn’t saying much. 

“Everythin’s goin’ to shit,” Sissy said crisply. A fleck of spit hit Jaime’s coffee cup. He stared at it forlornly. “Everythin’. And you’re just sittin’ there a-readin’ the paper like it’s Sunday fuckin’ mornin’.” He took a deep, calming breath and set the sports section aside.

“What is it that you want me to do, Sissy?”

“What do I _want you to do?”_ Her eyebrows shot up, and Jaime knew he had fucked up despite his best efforts to remain neutral. “I want you to get your ass out there and fix what you dumbasses broke. Take out the Starks, you said. Take out Uncle Jon and Bob. We get all the profit that way, you idjits said. Trust Bolton, you said. Welp, now we ain’t makin’ any profit, Bolton’s hillbilly ass is rottin’ in a county plot, and I ain’t got fuck all to pass down to my babies when Jesus calls me home. I want you to get in the goddamn cook house yourself if you have to. Make me some money, Jaime.” She leaned across the table, her nostrils flaring dangerously. Unfazed, Jaime leaned back in his chair and regarded his sister with weary resignation. 

The eldest Lannister boy had been the holler’s golden child long before Robb Stark had been a twinkle in his father’s eye, but you can’t stay a golden child forever. Put bluntly, Jaime had peaked in high school. In the Midwest and the South, the High School Football Star is a common enough small-town fixture, but in Appalachia, high school sports aren’t quite as important. The people there have better things to do, namely getting wasted and trying not to die. Still, if you’re good at something, you’re good at it, and Jaime had received a football scholarship to the state college. It hadn’t been long, however, before a career-ending injury to his football-throwin’ hand had sidelined him and sapped his interest in the collegiate lifestyle, and he had moved back home for good.

It was then that the true fuckery had begun.

The father of the twins, known to his enemies and allies alike as Old Man Lannister and to his remarkably few friends as Mean Ol’ Bastard, had been whispering in Bob Baratheon’s ear ever since gullible, fun-loving Bob had jumped the broom with Sissy. He had whispered in Papa Targaryen’s ear way back when Bob was still getting in playground fights. He had built himself a cozy little niche in the industry, and he was not the kind of man to let his children go prodigal and ruin everything, so he had roped Jaime right back into the family business. The once-promising young athlete had become a common drug mule. Yet, somehow, that still wasn’t the worst of the fuckery.

We have to discuss one particular hillbilly trope that we’ve been dancing around. We can’t get avoid it. We have to sit down and talk about incest, kids. I mean, we’ve already talked about it a little bit, but now we really need to dig down deep and regurgitate everything we know about incest. Thankfully, we can put aside the deeply uncomfortable and unfortunate child-rape variety for a moment and focus instead on the deeply-rooted cultural notion of the kissin’-cousin. Presumably, the idea that rednecks are prone to marrying and/or getting down with their own family members originated in the stark fact that there just aren’t very many people in rural communities. The dating pool is generally small, greasy, and pathetic. Inbreeding, city-slickers concluded, and not lack of access to education and socio-economic deprivation, was the reason why all those crazy hicks ended up so dumb. 

Now, none of this is true, except when it is.

To be fair, it wasn’t the holler’s fault that Jaime had decided to goes heels-to-Jesus with his twin sister. He hadn’t had anyplace to go when he had moved back home, and the only one willing to take him in had been his sister, his most dedicated friend and companion since birth. She had gotten married right out of highschool to the biggest idiot around, a move she had made out of panic over the future than any genuine love connection, and had already begun the transition from ambitious queen bee to bitter, high-maintenance housewife. The marriage was already beginning to crumble. Bob was an alcoholic who liked bar whores more than he liked his wife and Sissy had a long list of things that she wanted, none of which Bob was providing fast enough. The siblings had bonded over their two equally impossible situations. They got drunk together. They cuddled like they had as children. Then things got weird.

Then things didn't seem so weird anymore.

Three kids and one dead husband later, Jaime still lived in his sister's house. The only difference was that he now occupied Bob's spot in the bed at night...but only in order to comfort his grieving sister, of course.

Before Jaime had to come up with an answer to Sissy’s demands, Joff saved him the trouble. The gangly teenager clattered into the kitchen with his backpack, late for school as usual.

“Mama, the prom’s tonight,” he said. “Maggie’s comin’ over with her gramma to take pictures or some shit. Can you make sure Uncle Ty ain’t passed out drunk on the couch for once?”

“'Course, sugar,” Sissy gushed. She plucked his backwards hat off his head and put it back on the right way. “You’re gonna look precious.”

“Stop it,” he whined, waving her tender hands away. “Don’t be clingy, mama.” He shouldered her out of the way and lumbered out of the kitchen. Much to Jaime's relief, Sissy's ire was now directed at a different target: their little brother, Ty, who was _just crashin’ on the couch for like, a week, man,_ and who happened to be snoring in the den at that precise moment. She shuffled out of the room in her slippers, hell bent on eliminating anything that could ruin her baby’s special night.

“Get your ass up and out, Ty,” she snapped, ripping the afghan off her sleeping brother, who awakened with a groan of protest.

There were several things that you didn’t want to be in rural West Virginia. As has already been demonstrated, a queer is one of them. A cripple is another, and, having inherited an unfortunate genetic condition, Ty fit the description. Despite the relentless mockery that had dogged him his entire life over his stature, or perhaps because of it, he had grown up to be a not-terrible human being. He had left the holler briefly after high-school on a full-ride to the local state college, but like his brother before him, he had flunked out and moved back home after two years. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been smart enough…it had just been a lot of adjusting. That, and he had much preferred getting schwasted every day to studying or showing up to class.

Sissy bullied him up, into some halfway presentable clothes, which he chose from a suitcase that was pushed up against the living room wall, and out the door in under ten minutes. Before she closed the door in his face, he managed a sullen,

“I’ll be at the bar if anyone wants to come and apologize to me.”

"Apologize to him," Sissy muttered, plucking her cigarette from where it was smoldering lazily in the ashtray on the table. Her roving eagle's eye fixed haughtily on the silent Jaime. "What are you starin' at? Go on, get. Make me rich."

*

MID-AFTERNOON, THREE DAYS EARLIER

Every time Theon stopped popping pills, he began to think about things that he didn’t really want to start thinking about, so the obvious solution, as always, was more drugs. But, again, as always, the drugs couldn't last forever. When he woke up alone on the mattress next to a half-eaten cheese sandwich at least a couple of days after he had started trying to erase his short-term memory with painkillers, his eyelids glued shut, his throat drier than his sense of humor, and reached for the little bottle, it did not rattle. 

He laid there for a while, afraid to face the literal and figurative headaches that were awaiting him, thinking about violent crime statistics. There was a certain amount of drug-related crime that everyone took for granted in the holler, but even so, this month’s numbers were above and beyond what the police were willing to turn a blind eye to. On top of that, there were MISSING posters featuring Stan’s little daughter everywhere, news crews crawling through in their logo-emblazoned vans trying to be surreptitious. Tensions were high, higher than they had been since Ned and Bob had gunned down the Targaryens. For the first time, Theon wasn’t naively confident that he was going to walk away from this. 

He checked his phone—no texts. He didn’t know what he had expected. The only people who had ever bothered to contact him had been Robb and Sansa, one of whom was dead and the other, no doubt blaming him for her brother’s fate. Theon couldn’t fault her there. He stood up, let the world spin around him for a disorienting moment, then picked his way downstairs, through the living room—where Ramsay was lying on his couch, smoking and staring at the ceiling like it owed him money—and into the kitchen. He didn't try to talk. He wasn't that stupid. If he opened his mouth just yet, he was either going to cry or vomit, and he still had _some_ dignity left.

__

There wasn’t much food in the house, but he managed to find a sleeve of Saltines and half a jar of peanut butter in the pantry that had long ago been filled with empty plastic bags and rinsed out mason jars, things you kept for the future, things you kept for no reason, things you kept because your parents had kept them. Channeling the Food Network, he arranged the crackers on a plate, stuck a knife in the peanut butter, and took his deconstructed hors d’oeuvre platter into the living room along with a plastic cup of tap water. He set the plate down on the coffee table and then sat down on the far end of the couch, curling his legs up underneath him. 

__

“Found some food,” Theon said, his voice gravelly from lack of use. The other man did not acknowledge that he had heard. “I’m gonna stick with you, you know that, right?” he said tentatively, brushing Ramsay’s leg with his fingers.

__

“Shit ain’t even started gettin’ rough yet.”

__

“I know that. I just wanted you to know. I ain’t gonna flip on you or nothin’.”

__

“How’s your face feel?” Ramsay looked at him for the first time. This was the best apology that Theon was going to get, and he knew that. He touched his jaw, which was purpling, and tongued the space where his tooth had been. He glanced at the glass of curdling milk on the coffee table…something told him that it wasn’t going back in his mouth. 

__

“It’s fine. It don’t hurt that bad.” They both knew that wasn't true. His whole face hurt, a deep, throbbing, bruised pain that despite its persistence, he was very used to. When he peanut-buttered a cracker and shoved it in his mouth, the simple act of chewing made his eyes tear up involuntarily.

__

“How many people you think I killed in my life?” Ramsay asked suddenly, stubbing out his cigarette on the back of the couch and immediately lighting another.

__

“Christ. I dunno. How many?”

__

“Six.” Theon stuffed a cracker in his mouth and waited for more information. “Didn’t even know who some of ‘em were. I shot most of ‘em. Knocked one over the head with a bat and he just never woke up. I don’t feel real bad about it, I guess, but I think about it sometimes.”

__

“What about your pa?” Theon asked with his mouth full of peanut butter cracker. He really wanted to ask how it had happened—what the argument had been about, what Roose had said that warranted patricide, if he had even had to say anything to deserve it—but this was an unprecedented amount of information from Ramsay, and he didn’t want to shut him down.

__

“Fuck no,” the other man scoffed. “I’m glad I wiped that shitstain off the planet. But this is the one I go away for.”

__

“You don’t know that.” Theon felt a strange panic begin to sizzle in his gut. He knew that he had managed somehow before Ramsay, but he had developed a dependence that he had never felt before; his whole life, Theon had been largely left to his own devices, sink or swim, and this was the first time that anybody except the Stark siblings had given even half a shit about what he did or where he went or what happened to him. After being independent for so long, it was intoxicating to have someone else making all the hard decisions. He didn’t know how to go back.

__

“No, I know. I dunno how long, or where, or for what exactly, but I’m goin’ away. And I want you to do three things for me while I'm gone.”

__

“Alright.” Theon swallowed. Standing orders. He could follow standing orders.

__

“Take care of my dogs.”

__

“’Course.” He laughed nervously. One of the only things that gave Theon any hope at all for their relationship was Ramsay's dogs. He had heard on television that burgeoning serial killers, people with no empathy and no normal connection to human emotion, started out by torturing small animals to death. And while Ramsay could shoot a raccoon or a squirrel through the eye without blinking, Theon had never seen him so much as kick a dog.

__

“Clean up the cook house.” Theon nodded.

__

“Wait for me.” He didn’t have to say anything else; the implication was strong enough. Theon was strangely touched.

__

“Yeah. Yeah.” Theon plucked the cigarette out of the other man’s mouth and kissed him. Just then, the doorknob turned. Yara dropped her bags inside the door, looked around at the wreckage of the living room, pressed her lips into a tight line, shook her head, and proclaimed: 

__

“Oh, hell no.” She pointed to Ramsay. “You, get the fuck out of here.” Theon. “You, get a vacuum cleaner and some goddamn Lysol and get to work.” Dany, who was lingering behind her as if unsure what she was supposed to be doing. “You, get in here and let them cats out.”

__

“Who the hell are you?” Ramsay asked languidly, sitting up and raising his eyebrows at Yara.

__

“Oh, that's cute, Bolton," she laughed, beginning to roll up her sleeves. "You always been so goddamn cute. You wanna do this? I did two hundred push-ups this mornin’. I can see you got them meth shakes from all the way over here. Get outta here, unless you want your boyfriend to watch his sister put your ugly ass in a wheelchair.”

__

“Yara, stop it," Theon interjected, looking panicked. He wasn't sure which of them he was more afraid of. "He ain't doin' nothin'."

__

"Bullshit." Yara's lip curled. Behind her, Dany scurried in and set down her bag and her cat carrier. She was watching the whole scene with a devilish sort of interest, one delicate pinkie finger tucked into the corner of her mouth. It almost looked like she was holding back laughter.

__

“I’ll call," Ramsay said coldly, grabbing his jacket and making for the door. He shouldered past Dany, faked a lunge toward her with a smug, "Boo!" She did not flinch.

"Boo, yourself, you asshole," she yelled out the open door at his retreating back. "Jeee-sus Christ but you're a fun family. Hi. I'm Dany. You must be Theon." She walked forward a little, extending her hand with a genuine smile. He just stared at her, winded, then stuffed another cracker in his mouth and went back to dumbly chewing. 

*

__

3:00 P.M. PROM DAY

“Will you go to the prom with me?”

__

Sansa was hiding in the bathtub with her cellphone, speaking softly. The bathtub was the only place that Jon couldn’t hear her talking on the phone. Army life had turned him into a regular Nazi; he woke everyone up at five in the morning, shouted at them until they were dressed and eating breakfast, then hustled them out the door as if they were being loaded into an armored convoy instead of a school bus. He monitored their phones so that he could make sure none of them were getting into the kind of trouble orphaned children might try to get into. Sansa doubted he would like it if he caught her dialing the number for a certain Kentucky police station.

__

“Fuck no," Clegane replied on the other end, obviously nonplussed at having had his workday interrupted to be invited to the senior prom. Sansa had been expecting his refusal; she summarily ignored it.

__

“It’s tonight. Anybody’s allowed to come as long as they’re somebody else’s date. A couple years ago Rachel Berry brought her uncle. Sammy Longwater brought some long-haul trucker last year. He was like, forty. You ain’t gotta wear a suit, but you’ll look real stupid if you don’t.”

__

“I ain’t got a suit.”

__

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, are you twelve years old? What grown-ass man don’t own a suit?” She rolled her eyes. She was only eighteen and she had already spent far too much of her time and energy making up for male incompetence.

__

“That don’t matter ‘cause I ain’t goin’ to no prom.”

__

“Sure you are. You wanna feel a girl up the day her mama dies, you gotta take that girl to her senior prom. That’s redneck law.” She could tell immediately that she had touched a nerve. His voice softened.

__

“I’m sorry ‘bout that. Shouldn’t have happened.”

__

“I ain’t sorry. I’m just tryna guilt you. It’s pretty easy.” And just like that, all the sympathy was gone.

__

“I’m a police officer. I can’t take nobody to her prom. I’ll get fired.”

__

“Come on. I’m legal. It’s just a dance. I ain’t got time to argue with you. Just pick me up at 7:30. The usual spot." Sansa hung up and climbed out of the bathtub. It was only three, but she was going to have to start getting ready if she wanted enough time to paint her nails, put on her dress, get her hair done, and practice walking around in her way-too-tall heels before she had to leave the house.

__

Prom dresses are difficult to come by in places like Winter Holler. There weren’t many places to buy clothes. You could pick up a few plain-colored t-shirts or camisoles or shorts or underpants at the Family Dollar, but other than that, you were gonna have to drive to the next town over. Most people wore their older siblings’ hand-me-downs or their cousins’ hand-me-downs or the neighbors’ hand-me-downs. The Church of Christ occasionally held a rummage sale, but there was usually nothing good there for anybody under the age of sixty-five. Unfortunately for Sansa, her mother had never gone to the prom and she was the eldest sister, leaving her with Nan's granddaughter's pink, sparkly J.C. Penney ballgown. Hairdressers were even less common, so Sansa found herself sitting in front of the big mirror in her parents’ room, now Jon and Ygritte’s, with her sister-in-law wielding a hairbrush like a semi-automatic behind her.

__

“Alright, kid, I know two hairstyles: army bun and French braid. Which’ll it be?”

__

“French braid?” Sansa said tentatively, already flinching even though Ygritte hadn't gone anywhere near her head yet. She had a feeling this wasn't going to be anything like her mother's gentle preening, a thought which sent a shock of staggering, hot grief through her entire body, a physical pain.

__

“Good choice.” The older woman began to section her long red hair with strong, sure hands. Sansa had been too wrapped up in her own struggles to speak with her newfound sister-in-law much other than a few morning-and-evening pleasantries each day, but after Jon made everyone get into bed and turn their lights off at nine on the dot, she sometimes laid awake and listened to the young couple fight. She felt bad for Ygritte, stuck up on a mountain someplace she had never asked to be with nothing to do and nobody she knew.

__

“How did you and Jon meet?” Sansa asked the only question she could think of, her voice meek and small, almost embarrassed.

__

“We met a couple months before his first tour of duty at a shooting range on the base.” Their eyes met in the mirror. Sansa couldn't contain her giggle. The other woman smiled, narrowing her eyes. "You wanna hear the story or not, smartass? Anyway, he was shooting, I was shooting, then he ran out of ammo and came to ask me if I had any spare. He tapped me on the shoulder while I still had my earplugs in and I almost shot him in the face.”

__

“Jesus Christ.”

__

“Yep. I thought he was the dumbest shit-for-brains idiot I’d ever met. Then, you know, he grew on me. You ain’t really supposed to mess around with your fellow soldiers, so after a couple two, three months we went to our CO and we told him that we were getting married. He got deployed a week later.” They were both silent for a moment, save Ygritte's quiet cursing as she fumbled one strand of hair and had to begin a section of the braid over again. Sansa was surprised at how gentle her hands were; no pulling, no snagging, no braiding too tight.

__

“Jon don’t really talk to us ‘bout his life much," Sansa said finally. "But I guess I don't talk to him 'bout mine, neither."

__

“He doesn’t talk to me much either, believe me." She paused and pretended for a moment to be absorbed in the braid she was making. "He was in Afghanistan for six months, and when he came back, he wasn’t the same. He ain’t the same.”

__

“Yeah, I noticed," Sansa said wryly. "He didn’t use to be this much of an asshole.” She knew immediately that she had said the wrong thing. Ygritte tied off the braid, her face frozen in a vague expression of hurt, and gave the end of it a little tug.

__

“Go on. Go to your prom. You look pretty. Your date picking you up?”

__

“He’s meetin’ me down the road.” Sansa touched the braid, feeling its thick, even curves beneath her elven fingers. The older woman laughed, short and sharp.

__

“Smart girl.”

__

*

THE DAYS LEADING UP TO THE PROM

__

Ramsay didn’t call. 

__

The next time Theon went up to the trailer, it was empty, the screen door banging back and forth in the wind, and the neighbors said they'd taken Ramsay away in handcuffs. There was still a rusty-colored stain on the gravel drive that suggested blood. He took Daisy the fat beagle home with him and let her sleep in his bed. She didn’t bother Dany’s cats and the cats didn’t bother her. All she really wanted was a warm place to nap, lots of snacks, a yard to shit in, and somebody to rub her spotted belly occasionally. The other dogs stayed up at the trailer. Theon went twice a day to feed, water, and spend a little time playing with the pack. It took him a week to clean up Roose's cookhouse. The smell was too bad to stay there for much longer than a few hours. He had set up in an old abandoned hunter's lodge higher up-mountain; the tiny abode was crammed with tubes, plastic jugs and bottles, glass beakers that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie, extra drain cleaner and empty Sudafed boxes, singed pots and pans, funnels, and plastic gloves. Adding to the miasma of filth were several unrecognizable animals that had crawled in through the broken windows and died and several half-eaten meals that had obviously been left there to rot by the proprietor of the establishment. Theon was as careful as he could be. He knew that meth labs were prone to exploding, but he wasn't sure exactly which component caused the exploding, so he handled everything with equal caution. He filled up several garbage bags and cardboard boxes with shit, drove them a couple of counties over in the trunk of the Monte Carlo, and tossed them in the dump. When the lodge was finally empty, he thought about burning it down just to clear out any remaining evidence, but then thought again of the shelled-out wreckage of the few meth-explosions of which he had seen the aftermath and decided to just leave it as it was, dead animals, moldy cheeseburgers and all. 

__

Dany and Yara spent their first couple of days in town drinking beer and chatting while they watched Theon clean the Greyjoy house, occasionally calling out to remind him of something he hadn’t done yet or encourage him with a sort of malicious glee that made him progressively grumpier. Yara dragged their father's huge, old boombox out of the garage and played the dusty CDs Balon had kept in an untidy stack underneath the tool bench. It was all the typical shit, classic rock, The Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top, The Eagles, Def Leppard, and so on, and so on.

On that particular night, they were watching Theon scrub the kitchen floor from a pair of folding chairs in the living room. The front door was open so that the lake wind blew through the screen door, sweet with just the tiniest hint of rot, thick with the sound of early crickets. The two women were each quite a few drinks into their conversation, so when the opening chords of "Pour Some Sugar on Me" blasted through the ancient speakers, there was nothing stopping Dany from jumping to her feet in excitement.

__

“I used to dance to this song with a big ol’ snake down in Tennessee,” she squealed.

__

_“You_ were a stripper?” Yara scoffed, rolling her eyes. Every conversation with Dany was two truths and a very clever lie.

__

_“Not_ a stripper. An exotic entertainer.”

__

“Uh-huh. This is like, the only stripper song, Dany.”

__

“Oh, shut up." She waved her hand dismissively. "Any-hoo, I’d have this huge banana python ‘round my neck like Britney Spears, and I’d dance with it like it was a feather boa. Her name was Reba, after Reba McIntyre.” Dany plucked one of her wily cats from the couch and draped it around her neck luxuriously, ignoring its hisses of protest, giving a demonstrative shimmy. "She lived in a cage in the back of the club, in the room the owner dealt his cocaine out of. Sometimes he'd give her some just for a laugh. He was a prick. I wanted to take her with me when I left, but I already had the cats, and I can only carry so much..." Yara shook her head. 

"Are you really tellin' me that you used to strip with a cocaine-addicted banana python named Reba in Knoxville, Tennessee?"

"Damn straight. Ask anybody in that shithole town." The cat yowled and scrambled away from its mother, hitting the carpet silently and scurrying away. Dany rubbed her neck where it had scratched her and giggled. "And what, your life ain't never got a little weird?"

"Not that weird." Yara glanced around Dany and frowned at Theon's cleaning job. "Get in the grout, you little shit." He glared at her wordlessly. "Don't look at me like that. _You_ called _me._ Not that I ain't grateful. I'd still be bored to death down in San Diego and not here in the extraordinary company of Miss Targaryen here if you hadn't."

"I ain't never been to California," Dany said wistfully, still swaying to the song, swinging her hair in a practiced stripper-swirl around her shoulders. "Maybe I oughtta stick with you, Miss Greyjoy."

"Maybe you oughtta," Yara said with a smile. "How much I owe you for this dance?"

"Aww, it's free," she giggled in reply, shimmying over and seating herself in Yara's lap, wrapping her arms around her neck. "On account of I ain't got the python. I'd feel bad cheatin' you like that." Yara put her beer down and set her broad, callused hands on the other woman's skinny hips. 

"I 'preciate that, darlin'."

__

*

8:00 AM. PROM MORNING

The next morning, Dany roused herself much earlier than she would have preferred so that she could leave before Yara woke up and started asking questions. She disentangled herself from the cheap sheets and the other woman's muscular limbs. Yara slept like a bear, on her stomach, heavy, snoring a little bit. Dany felt guilty for a moment before she reminded herself that she had to look out for herself. She had to make her own money. Nobody was doing to take care of her, not this woman, not anybody. She put on her combat boots and her heart-shaped sunglasses, borrowed the rental car, and went looking for the local watering hole. She had come to terms with the fact that she had no idea how to make meth and she was going to need to ask for help. She knew that Yara's brother could probably help her, but she liked her too much to dredge all that up. Anyway, the kid was miserable enough.

It didn't take her long to find the bar. They had driven past it on their way in a few days prior. Dany did not hesitate before she entered; she had been in much shiftier places and had walked out not only alive, but sometimes quite a bit richer. The bar was empty except for the bartender, a tired-looking middle-aged woman who was still taking the chairs off the tables, and an extremely small man perched on a bar stool, nursing something that looked like it had no business being drank before ten in the morning. Dany sat down next to him and asked the bar maid whether or not she had any orange juice. The woman nodded and poured her a glass of Minute Maid. The little man glanced over at her, then pulled a double-take.

__

“Hey. You look awful familiar," he drawled, narrowing his eyes at her. "You from around here? You...you ain't a Targaryen, are ya?"

__

“Yeah, I am. Dany. Who’s askin’?” She glared at the man as she sipped her orange juice imperiously, wearing her meanest expression. This was her first time in contact with the local yokels and she wanted to make an impression.

__

“Name’s Ty. Pleased to meet you, lil’ lady.” They chatted for a bit. Dany began to piece together how his family had worked in relation with her own; their partnership, she recalled from her brother's stories, had not ended in a genial manner, but she could tell that Ty didn't care much for his family. He spoke about them with a sarcastic disdain that bordered on hatred. She was beginning to think that this was her lucky day.

__

“Hey, Ty, I got a question for you," she said after about a half an hour of small talk.

__

“Shoot.”

__

“You know anythin’ ‘bout this?" She spread out the ancient piece of paper on the bar: the recipe for her late father's extra-potent amphetamines. Ty's eyebrows shot up. He leaned back on the stool, shaking his head as if he couldn't believe what was in front of him.

__

"Well sheeeeeeeeee-it."

__

*

8:30 P.M. PROM NIGHT

In the holler, just as at most rural proms, Jesus was the guest of honor. The abstinence-only sex-ed they taught at the high school was put into best practice at the annual dance, which would only turn into an orgy at the afterparty. The chaperones made sure that every couple left room for the Son of God between their nubile young bodies, and there was absolutely no grinding, shimmying, butt-touching, or kissing allowed. There was no food, and no punch, and no DJ, and nothing else that you see on T.V. concerning proms. There was just a table with a stack of cups, a couple two-liters of Sprite, and one grainy speaker grinding out sugary pop hits for the kids to hand-jive to, or whatever dance it was they were doing those days. The decorations were minimal. The chosen theme was “under the sea,” so someone had taped some blue and green streamers to the walls of the cafeteria along with some pictures of fish, lobsters, starfish, etc. They left all the buzzing fluorescent lights on so nobody could get away with anything unseemly.

__

Nobody was having fun, but everyone kind of felt like they should have been having fun, so they tried to seem like they were having fun so nobody else would know that they weren’t having fun. It seemed like the whole school turned to look when Sansa and Sandor came in, but in reality, it was just the kids closest to the door glancing over their shoulders and snickering. The pair had spent the ride to the highschool arguing over whether or not it was weird for them to show up at the prom together. They certainly looked mismatched enough: Sansa's dress looked like a life-size Barbie outfit, all tasteless taffeta and rhinestones, complete with puffy cap sleeves, and in lieu of a suit, Sandor was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a flannel button-up. In his own defense, he had claimed that it was the most formal thing he owned besides funeral clothes, but she wasn't sure she believed him.

__

"Let's dance, okay?" Sansa said with a sigh, dragging him by the arm into the thick of the over-perfumed teen bodies.

__

"You owe me for this, little girl," Sandor grumbled ominously, even as he followed her flouncing skirt into the crowd without resistance.

__

"Shut up." Something soft and nearly tuneless was playing with an R&B artist crooning amorous cliches almost desperately. Sansa didn't seem to notice the chaperones eyeing the two of them with distaste, but Sandor sure did, and he made sure to keep his hands well above ass-level on her waist to avoid any surreptitious calls to the police. With the help of her heels, Sansa managed to be tall enough to wrap her arms most of the way around his neck. For a few songs, things seemed as normal as they possibly could have seemed. Sandor felt like he was back in highschool again, but this time he was killing it: he was the tallest, he had the best facial hair of anybody in the room, he was acne-free, and he was dancing with the prettiest girl. He had no memory of his own senior prom. He probably hadn't gone, probably had spent the evening playing beer pong with Greg and his friends or something. It felt good to see Sansa happy. He hadn't seen her since the night her mother and brother had died, but he doubted she had done much smiling between then and now. She pointed out couples to him, gossiping about them in a chirping whisper, talking about how _over_ highschool she was even as she reminisced about her freshman year. He was actually listening. Sandor couldn't remember the last time he had listened to a woman talk.

The spell was broken when the class president, a nerdy little fuck in a blue tuxedo, stepped onto the stage and stumbled up to the microphone in the center.

"Can I have your attention?" he asked as the music cut out. Everyone stopped dancing and turned to look. The kid turned bright red. "You've been votin' all week for prom king and queen, and it's time to find out the results. The nominees are..." He fumbled with a sheet of paper. "Lynn and Eddie." Applause. Someone hooting. "Amy-Ann and Trevor." Applause. "And Joff and Maggie." Sansa wrinkled her nose. 

"I hope they lose." The kid folded his paper, visibly sweating, and continued.

"And the winners by a landslide are Joff and Maggie!"

__

“Ew,” Sansa groaned. “Let’s get the fuck out of here before we have to watch them dance.” Maggie skipped up onto the stage, glittering in silver sequins with her hair curled like a model, but her smile faded when she realized that her date was nowhere to be seen. The emcee called his name a few more times; the crowd of teens packed into the cafeteria began to murmur and look from side to side, wondering where Joff had gone Someone had just seen him, they said, where had he run off to? Onstage, Maggie was turning the color of Carrie's pig's blood, her manicured hands balled into vicious little fists. Sansa had never seen anything more satisfying in her entire life.

__

They found him in the boy's room on the second floor, sprawled out on the floor in front of the urinals. Blood had leaked into all the grouts, pooled in the dips in the ancient tile, splattered on the already-stained porcelain. Joff had been stabbed seven times right through the classy silver cummerbund that matched Maggie's dress perfectly at his senior prom.

__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly, Dirty Stripper Hobo Dany is giving me life. I'm not sure why I didn't bring her in sooner.


	8. Do You Have a Moment to Talk About Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some of our heroes find Jesus. The rest of them keep being heathens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ya'll. I'm sorry. My life became a tornado there for a minute. Thank you all for sticking with me!
> 
> Once again, my Tumblr is https://www.tumblr.com/blog/unejolieordure. Please tell me what I'm supposed to do with it. I've been on there for a while now and I'm just aimlessly reblogging things with no clue as to whether I'm doing it right or not. All my friends just keep laughing at me.

There are two things that can turn a person to Jesus Christ faster than you can say the Lord’s prayer: prison and tragedy. In prison, all you have is time to think about how you got there and how to get out. Some believe that lack of vitamin Christ is what led to their sinful criminal ways in the first place. Some just believe that a good Christian prisoner can get out faster than a skinhead, and those people would be right. Tragedy, on the other hand, leaves people blindly searching for answers, and one of the more maladaptive answers for “why is the world terrible” is “because everyone is bad and God hates us.” So far, none of our characters have been seen to be particularly religious despite their Appalachian raisin’, but that’s about to change.

There are three separate but related events I would like to address. The first is the curious case of Maggie Tyrell. Now, Maggie had been through some shit in the past few months. First, her brother had gotten his head gay-bashed in and had spent weeks recovering on their pull-out couch while the whole world taunted Maggie in his stead. Secondly, her boyfriend had been stabbed to death at their senior prom right at the moment when she had been about to be crowned prom queen. It was enough to make anyone reconsider their life, or try to, anyway. 

The tent revival had gone out of style, but that didn’t mean it didn’t still exist. The people of Appalachia were always in need of a good fire-and-brimstone tongue-lashing and a reminder of who was the real enemy: Ol' Scratch. The traveling revival came to town that week and erected their huge plastic-sided circus tent in a field right outside of town, next to an abandoned Baptist church with a cracked, dandelion-infested parking lot full of beer bottles, abandoned flip-flops, and used needles. The preachers who headed up these affairs were usually flashy types, white teeth and big belt-buckles and hair plugs, but the preacher who came to town that week was far from flamboyant. He was a modest-looking elderly man who wore t-shirts and jeans and white tennis shoes that were falling apart on his feet. He directed the activities of his crew in a soft, fatherly voice.

They didn't get a great turnout on day one. They had probably had better luck in Indiana and Illinois, places where people still had things like "hope" and "faith" that the Appalachians had given up on a couple decades back when most of the coal mines had closed down. Still, a couple of toothless widows and devout home-schooling mothers showed up to sit and sweat on the hastily erected metal bleachers. The next day, there were more people there. By the third day, the bleachers were full, and among the attendees were Maggie, her brother, and her grandma. Maggie's grandma was a bitter old crone who didn't believe in much of anything, let alone virgin births and magic resurrections, but she liked to support her grandchildren, and this was the first time Maggie had wanted to leave the house since the prom incident. As Grandma Tyrell well knew from her many years on the Earth, there were three major parts to any proper Pentecostal service:

1\. Proselytizing

Hook 'em by telling everyone they're going to hell in like, fifty different ways.

2\. Speaking in Tongues

Get crazy. Pretend to have a seizure. Wave your hands in the air. Fall over. Babble. It's that kind of party.

3\. Faith Healing

Everyone, get in a line! The preacher is gonna smack you in the forehead and thereby alleviate you of all your worldly pain and suffering. 

This service, however, was going to go a bit differently.

The second is the case of our favorite soldier, Jon. He was in desperate need of some counseling, but as you should know by now, rednecks don’t do therapy. It doesn’t matter what’s wrong. Hearing voices? Here, drown them out with this corn liquor. Anxious? There’s some guy behind the gas station selling Xanax. Depressed? Shut up and snort this shit, buddy. Hillbillies are anarchists. Anti-system, anti-government. Antidepressants are a tool of the oppressor. Even if someone had wanted to go and see a talking head, there was nowhere within a fifty mile radius that provided counseling services, and no money to spare besides. Drugs were a lot cheaper than health insurance premiums, and you know what was even cheaper than drugs? Jesus. Jesus is free.

Sansa came home one afternoon to find Stan Baratheon’s preacher woman sipping ice tea in the kitchen, right where Cat had one sat with the Book of Mormon. She was sitting at the table with her ever-present Bible, smiling smugly and nodding as she talked with Jon. Sansa’s breath caught in her chest, flooded with images of Stan's brains splattered on his dirty tent, the little bones stacked in the fire pit like so much kindling.

“Sansa, this is Mellie,” her brother said, standing up and beckoning her into the kitchen. "Mellie, you know my sister Sansa."

"Of course!" Mellie said warmly, her eyes bright with a wholesome light that concealed something dull and ugly. "Come on and sit down, Sansa. Me and your brother were havin' us a little bit of Bible study."

Lastly, we have the case of Brandon Stark, who was about to cash in on one of Pentecostalism's creepier inventions: the child preacher. He had never been a very popular boy, preferring to keep to himself at school, but he had recently made a very peculiar friend who had roped him into a very curious pastime. Jojo was a skinny kid endowed with intelligence beyond his years and a plan to get a leg-up on the unforgiving world he had been born into. Brandon had begun to accompany him weekly to his church, a small, cement building tucked away in a cluster of oak trees just beyond a cluster of trailers. Every Sunday, Jojo aged thirteen, preached the gospel, spoke in tongues, healed the sick, and handled poisonous snakes, and Brandon was beginning to believe that he could do the same.

We'll come back to all this Bible-thumping later. Right now, let's see what Ol' Sandy's getting up to.

*

Usually when Sandor got a call from Sissy, his guts knotted up like angry snakes, but this time, he felt oddly calm. On some level that wasn't quite conscious he knew that this was the last time. When he pulled up to the Lannister house, the driveway was clogged with other vehicles. At first he couldn't figure what the occasion was, but then it dawned on him: Joff’s funeral had been earlier that day.

He could barely push his way through the door; the little cracker-box was packed with people dressed in their best faded black. The smell of comfort food hit him strong; every kind of pie and casserole imaginable littered every available surface in the kitchen. Sissy was on him in an instant, her talons wrapped around his forearm, looking like some skeletal blonde Elvira in her funeral dress.

“Come with me,” she said woodenly. She dragged him away from the mingling mourners, who patted her arm and clucked at her sympathetically as she passed, and up the stairs, into a spare bedroom with a bare mattress shoved up against a wall, piled with old junk.

“Who killed my son, Clegane?” she hissed through her teeth as she slammed the door, her face contorted with emotion. He shook his head.

“I dunno.”

“You _dunno?_ You were too busy tryin’ to get your hand up Sansa Stark’s skirt to notice my son bein’ _stabbed to death_ right under your fuckin’ nose?” He hadn't planned on baiting death that day, but there was suddenly something so unbearable about pretending to tolerate this woman for one more second that he couldn't help it. He wasn't ready--his Leaving West Virginia Fund wasn't enough padding, he hadn't done everything he had wanted to do--but it didn't matter anymore. It was over. Sandor glowered and drew himself up to his full, imposing height.

“That’s right. I dunno, and to be honest with you, I’d like to give whoever done it a fuckin’ medal.” Her lips pressed so tightly together that they lost all their color. The rest of her face, by contrast, was beginning to turn purple. “Joff wasn’t never gonna be man enough to handle all this bullshit and you know it. Just in case you ain't figured it out yet, I don’t work for you no more, Sissy.” Mechanically, he opened the door and strode out into the hall, back downstairs, unheeded by the mourners, and back out into the driveway. Everything except for his own heartbeat sounded strangely muffled. In his truck, Sandor dialed Sansa’s number without even thinking about it. He had nobody else to tell news to. 

“Hello?” She sounded confused; he realized too late that she didn't have his cell number, and that it was maybe a little bit weird that he had copied hers from the caller ID at the police station. Nevertheless, he didn't bother to identify himself. There was no time for fucking around anymore.

“I’m leavin’,” he said bluntly, backing out of the driveway so fast that he fishtailed a little.

“You’re what?” She had recognized his voice. She was with the program now. That was one of the things he liked about Sansa--she was quick on the uptake.

“I’m leavin’ West Virginia.” 

“When?”

“Now.”

_“Now?_ Why? Where you goin’?”

“I gotta get gone. Sissy’s likely to have me shot.” He was bouncing along the dirt road as fast as he could go without jolting the wheels of the truck right off.

“Pick me up,” Sansa said authoritatively, and for once, he didn't argue with her.

“I’m gonna pack my shit and then I’ll be right there.” He made it home in half the time it usually took; Sandor parked the truck haphazardly by the goat pen and rushed inside so fast that he didn't even notice Greg's truck parked on the other side of the driveway. The inside of the trailer looked like what you would expect the inside of a trailer inhabited by two bachelor brothers and decorated by a long-dead old woman would look like: absolute shit. There were discarded clothes and empty cans everywhere, the little statues and miscellaneous religious tchotchkes that old Mrs. Clegane had left on all the tables and shelves were dusty, and there wasn't a clean plate anywhere in sight. The whole place was dark, shaded by huge, heavy, floral curtains that nobody had touched in years. Sandor made straight for his bedroom, ducking beneath the door frame that had been too short for him since he had turned sixteen, and flipped his mattress. It wasn't exactly an original place to hide a large sum of money, but it was the most secure hiding place he had. Just as he was stuffing the cash into his back pocket, he heard the telltale sound of footfalls in the hall

"What're you doin'?" Big Greg asked, stooping under the doorway. "Why're you home so early?" He looked back and forth between Sandor and the flipped mattress as if trying to make sense of a totally incomprehensible puzzle.

"Nothin," Sandor replied, starting to shove whatever was closest to him on the floor into a duffel bag. "I'm goin' out of town for a couple days."

"How come?" Greg asked, scowling. "Somethin' for Sissy?"

"Yeah," Sandor said without looking up. "Somethin' for Sissy."

"You're bullshittin' me." Greg folded his massive arms across his chest. "You're fuckin' dippin' out."

"Get out the way, Greg," Sandor said, giving up on trying to wrangle his belongings and trying to sidestep his brother. Unfortunately, Greg had the narrow doorway pretty well blocked with his massive, murderous girth, and he wasn't planning on moving until he had answers. Sandor was starting to panic. The last time he had fought with his brother had been the time he had lost half of his face, and he wasn't keen on losing the other half. So he did what all underdogs do in nasty situations; he swept the bigger guy's legs out from under him and then ran. By the time Greg had managed to get back to his feet, Sandor was already halfway down the road in his truck, headed for the Stark house, or rather, a couple yards away from the Stark house where Jon wouldn't be able to see his sister getting into a strange vehicle through the woods. Sansa was waiting where she was usually waiting: under a big pine tree, jiggling her leg impatiently. He barely slowed the truck down so that she could get in before he was peeling off again, kicking up red dust behind the wheels.

"So you finally gave it to her, huh?" she asked, not sure whether to laugh or not.

"I told 'er I wanted to give whoever done Joff in a medal," he replied, somewhat out of breath from the numerous close encounters he had just had with dangerous crazy people. Sansa whistled.

"I'm surprised she didn't shoot you right then and there. Where we goin'?" She looked out of the window as if trying to guess their destination, tightening her ponytail as if to prepare for any eventuality.

"I dunno. Out the way." He had a spot in mind. He was just afraid that it would sound shifty if he said it out loud.

“You bring any booze?” she asked after a moment, shooting a mischievous smile at him. He did not return it.

“You’re an alcoholic,” Sandor pronounced grimly. 

“That’s fuckin’ ridiculous," Sansa scoffed, affronted, but he clearly was not joking.

“It’s cute now because you’re young and pretty but it ain’t gonna be pretty when your liver quits like my pa’s did.”

“Is this what you picked me up for?” she asked wryly. “Advice?” He glared at her and pulled sharply off the road. Sansa squeaked in surprise as they plowed through high grass for a moment before coming to a shuddering halt behind a looming, skeletal structure that appeared to be alone in the middle of nowhere on a lonely stretch of mountain: the local coal elevator, abandoned, a wood-and-steel behemoth stuck, crumbling, like a massive, dead spider trying to curl its legs in.

"Alright, little girl, listen to me," the man said briskly, throwing the truck into park and shutting it off. "I cleaned up human remains before breakfast for you. I went to your goddamn prom. If you don't know by now that I'd do whatever you wanted, then you ain't bright. But I don't want to fuck you up. You still got a lot of life left to live." She threw her head back against the seat and groaned dramatically.

“Are we gonna go over this again? Come on. You can’t fuck me up. All the real bad things that are gonna happen to me in my life have already happened.” He felt a pang at this youthful optimism. Statistically speaking, that wasn’t true, but he didn't have the heart to interject. “Now _you_ listen to _me._ You ain’t half as scary as you think you are.” It always seemed to happen in the blink of an eye with them. One minute she was staring him down from across the truck, and the next she was holding his face in her hands, kissing him with an intensity that was almost angry. She crawled into his lap and rocked herself against him, her cheeks red, her head bent forward both to keep her from hitting her head on the ceiling and to kiss him. She was looking at him in a way that made his blood boil; a woman had never looked at him like that before, with her mouth open a little bit, all hot and bothered. She clearly didn’t know what to do with herself. She wanted him to tell her what to do next. He suddenly felt like a virgin, too. If she kept doing what she was doing he was going to jizz in his pants like he was sixteen. He popped the button on her shorts.

“Are you gonna fuck me?” Sansa asked, sounding a little afraid of the prospect, some of the color going out of her cheeks.

“Fuck no. I ain’t gonna take your virginity in a fuckin’ truck in the woods,” Sandor muttered. “That’s fucked up, even for you, lil’ miss alcoholic nymphomaniac.” She giggled, strangely put at ease by this. "Lay down, alright?” She shimmied off his lap and laid down on the seat, her shoulders against the far door. He popped the button on her shorts and slid them down around her knees along with her underwear, the ten-in-a-pack kind from the dollar store. Sansa Stark had been through too much in her short life to be nervous about some dude seeing her hoo-ha, but nevertheless, her only other explicitly sexual experience had been heavy-petting with Joff, including one terrible, short-lived finger-bang that had ended in blood, tears, and shouting. She was about to ask him just what he intended on doing when he bent over and buried his face in the knot of curly red hair between her legs.

Guys who haven't been able to rely on their good looks their whole lives tend to be better at sex. It's just a fact. Sandor Clegane had chosen the art of cunnilingus so that no unfortunate dame was forced to look at his face for too long, and he had gotten pretty damn good at it, if he did say so himself. Sansa seemed to agree. She instinctively spread her freckled legs as wide as she could get them in the cramped space, reaching up to hold onto the grab handle attached to the ceiling for leverage. She had never really expected to be in this position...according to her mother, sex was for baby-makin', and according to Maggie, sex was something you did to make people like you, so it was hard to reconcile those perceptions with her current reality, which was accomplishing neither of those things, but _was_ making her feel mighty tingly. His tongue was going places even she herself had barely gone; when he glanced up at her to see how she was doing, she looked him right in the eye, and shuddering and fluttering, came right there and then. Her eyes crossed a little bit, he noted with no small amount of self-satisfaction.

Sandor sat up and wiped his mouth on the cuff of his shirt. Sansa watched him, breathing heavily, her legs shaking a little bit as she brought them back together as if trying to salvage some semblance of ladyhood.

“Are you sure you don’t wanna…?”

“I’m sure,” he said, pulling up her shorts with one definitive movement and buttoning them back up for her. “I ain’t seventeen. I ain’t gonna die if I don’t get my dick wet.” She stayed where she was, staring at him, a strange, thoughtful little smile on her face. 

"Come with me," he blurted before he could stop himself. "Let's get outta here." All at once, the smile was gone.

"I can't," Sansa said, at a loss, sitting up straight. "I mean, I'm gonna graduate this month...and my little brothers and sister...I can't just go."

"I know. I shouldn't have asked," he said dully, turning the key to start the car back up. "Where do you want me to drop you off?"

*

Sansa traipsed into Theon’s store as the truck that had dropped her off sped away and propped her elbows on the counter. She leaned across, her eyes bright, her hair messy.

“I need to talk to you,” she said bluntly. “Where you been?”

“I thought you were mad at me,” he replied, blinking in confusion. “I was givin’ you space.”

“What would I be mad at you for?” Aside from looking pretty damn surprised to see her, Theon looked better than he had in a while; he looked like somebody had made him brush his hair and his teeth and do his laundry.

“I thought you would blame me," he said sheepishly. "About Robb and your mama.”

“Why would I blame you? You had nothin' to do with it.” Without another word, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, called up his voicemail, put his phone on the counter, and pushed it toward her. Raising one eyebrow quizzically, she pressed play on the message. He watched her face as it played: first shock, then horror, then grief. When it was over, she shook her head and pushed the phone back across the counter. “I wish you woulda told me before. You couldn’t have done nothin’, Theon. It was already too late,” she whispered, wiping at her eyes. “Delete that message. That ain’t how Robb wants himself remembered.” They stood there in silence for a moment while Sansa regained her composure; Theon opened his mouth to comfort her, but before he could speak, she caught a glimpse of the empty socket where his least favorite tooth had once been.

“Oh my God. Your tooth!” she squealed, grabbing him by the arm, her tears immediately forgotten.

“Does it make me look like a hick?” he asked self-consciously, hiding his mouth behind a cupped hand. 

“Well, I ain’t gonna say it improves that face of yours. Did he do that to you? You know, _the guy?”_ He nodded reluctantly, and she widened her eyes in obvious indignation. “Hash this out for me one more time, because I don’t think I understand. You’re lettin’ Ramsay Bolton beat on you because _why?_ Never mind, don’t say nothin’. What would you say if your sister came home and said somebody’s been beatin’ on her?”

“Shut up. We’re in public," Theon hissed through his teeth, even though there was nobody in the store and furthermore, there hadn't been anyone in the store all day. "He ain’t my boyfriend, and if you think anybody could beat on my sister and live to tell then you ain’t never met her.”

“Well, what if I told you that someone had beat on me?”

“I’d tell you to call your good buddy Officer Clegane.” She made a face at him. “That’s different, anyway. You’re a girl.”

“All I know is that nobody who says they love you should ever lay a hand on you.” His face darkened immediately, and she knew that she had said something wrong, though she had no idea what it might have been.

“That’s real easy for you to say, Sansa," Theon said, pressing absently at the greenish bruising that wouldn't seem to go away at the corner of his mouth.

“What’s that s’posed to mean?” she asked, feeling strangely defensive.

“Some of us ain’t perfect.”

“Oh, come on, I ain't perfect, and you _definitely_ ain't, but both of us are better than trailer-trash meth-dealin’ Ramsay Bolton."

“Sansa, _I_ deal meth. So did your brother.”

“Yeah, but…you’re classier about it.” She paused, scrunching up her face. “You ain't on that shit, are you?”

“What?”

“Ice, you fuckin’ idjit.”

“Don’t you give me a fuckin’ lecture, Ginger Stark. I been gettin' enough of that from Yara." He busied his hands with a cardboard display of lighters, moving all the solid colored ones to the top and the patterned ones to the bottom. "It ain’t easy. Growin’ up like he grew up. Growin’ up like I grew up. Your mama and daddy…they had their problems, but they let you be who you wanted to be. Ramsay is who he had to be. And so am I. And it's kinda hard to keep lookin' at yourself in the mirror when you ain't the one who chose.” There is significant scientific evidence that proves that Theon was right. The brain is shaped by complex trauma, especially early in life when neural connections are forming very quickly. If the flight-or-flight response is triggered enough times, it can cause permanent dysfunction. People who report higher numbers of traumatic events before puberty are more likely to engage in high-risk behavior, develop substance abuse problems, and die young. People are so adaptable. They get used to things. They get used to living in chaos and after that, anything less seems too quiet.

“Yeah, that’s real sad," Sansa said quietly, straightening up. "Remind me to fuckin’ cry. Anyway, I didn’t come here on fag hag duty today. I came down here to tell you that Sandor Clegane ate me out behind the coal elevator and now he’s leavin’ town.” Theon looked up from the lighters and blinked hard a few times as if trying to acquaint himself with a new reality.

“Alright, you’re gonna have to explain that one to me.”

*

Theon was lazily moving cans of tuna around on a shelf, entertaining the wild fantasy that someday, somebody might come in and buy something, swirling Sansa's words around inside of his head, when his phone rang. He answered it without looking at the caller ID, grateful for any distraction, and was met by a cheerful recorded robot voice.

“This call is from an inmate in a West Virginia state prison. Press one if you would like to accept the charges.” Theon had heard this message before. His father had done several stints inside. Balon had never called just to check in…he had usually wanted money, or to yell at someone, or to give instructions about how certain illegal packages of certain illegal things were to be handled while he was away. Part of him was afraid that after all this time, it was his father again, back from oblivion to ruin everyone's lives. Nevertheless, Theon pressed one. After the message, there was about ten solid seconds of silence, followed by a static-laden,

“Hello?” It wasn't Balon. It was Ramsay.

“Hi,” Theon said, his heart in his throat.

“You bein’ good?” Theon closed his eyes. The question alone was enough to make his blood boil. He wanted Ramsay to come home and _make_ him be good. He laid in his bed at night with the belt still looped over the post and felt empty and hopeless.

“As good as I can be. Are you?”

“You know I ain’t.” Ramsay's voice was uncharacteristically slow and methodical, as though it was difficult for him to string a sentence together, slurring a little at the ends of words.

“You sound different.”

“They got me on them anti-psychotic drugs to shut me up. Did you do what I asked?”

“Yeah. All three things." Theon leaned against the shelf he had been stocking, feeling sort of dizzy. "I brought Daisy up to the house. Hope you don’t mind.”

“You’re gonna spoil her,” Ramsay admonished, but he wasn’t mad. He didn’t sound like he had enough energy to be mad. 

“What'd they get you on? Can I ask that?”

“Possession. The trailer don’t belong to me, so…most of what was inside don’t belong to me, ‘cept what I had on me. I’ll be out in a couple months.” Theon knew that he couldn’t ask about the murder, but he suspected that they hadn’t been able to find enough evidence to pin it on Ramsay. There were too many people who had motive to murder Roose Bolton, too many people with the same shotgun, nobody willing to testify against Ramsay in the court of law and risk his wrath, too much gun violence in the holler for anyone to waste precious resources on the murder of a known drug-peddler and kiddie-diddler. 

“That’s real good. Anythin’ else you want me to do?”

“Yeah. I heard Jon’s back up the holler. Tell him I said to fuck off before I come back and tell him myself.” 

Theon huffed a skeptical laugh. He wasn't sure whether Ramsay was serious or not, but it was best to err on the side of caution, as the unfortunate Stan had discovered.

“I miss you,” he said almost timidly, but Ramsay had already hung up, and Theon was talking to a dial tone.

*

Dany sat on the counter swinging her legs like a kid helping her mother bake cookies.

“You sure you know what you’re doin’?” she asked Ty, raising an eyebrow at him skeptically. “You ain’t gonna blow us up?”

“Fuck if I know,” he replied, passing a flask to her. “You make peace with your maker, Targaryen?” 

“Nope. So don’t blow us up.” She took a heavy gulp of the liquor and set the flask down beside her on the table. She had been reading off the instructions and measuring out the chemicals while Ty did all the hardcore cooking. They had set up shop in an abandoned trailer not far from Roose Bolton's emptied-out cookhouse, though neither of them knew that. Like Theon, they both knew that cooking meth was dangerous, but neither of them could quite pinpoint the dangerous part. To be safe, they had opened all the windows that hadn't been busted out already and each tied a bandanna around their mouth and nose to avoid breathing in any fumes. They were swigging liquor for courage (underneath their bandannas, of course).

"Ain't you done yet?" Dany asked, leaning over to see what Ty was doing. She was beginning to get antsy. 

"I think I'm 'bout to be. Now get out the way." He waved her away impatiently. Ty had arranged all their supplies on the cheap plywood counter-tops like a mad scientists' set-up. Most everything had already seen its use; he was getting ready to pour the contents of a glass flask into a soda bottle with the label ripped off, through a funnel lined with coffee filters. They both held their breath; Dany was holding a handful of her own bleached hair nervously, and Ty was sweating visibly, half from heat and half from nerves. Slowly, liquid separated from solid, filling the plastic bottle a quarter of the way.

"Is that it?" she asked.

"Now we just gotta dry it, accordin' to your pa," Ty said, holding up the bottle triumphantly. 

"You think it's good shit?" Dany asked, tearing her bandanna off and jumping down from the counter. Ty shrugged.

"I guess there's only one way to find out."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #unsexy


	9. Dumb Ways to Die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Despite some pretty dire medical emergencies, nobody goes to the hospital. Jon and Yara learn some hard truths. Sansa finally graduates. Jaime fucks up real bad. "The Dragon" takes off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven’t seen the new episodes yet, so don’t nobody spoiler me. I've been too busy getting up to shenanigans in tents. 
> 
> The amount of dead brothers in this fic calls for this song, written about the singer's very dead brother: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WoVIsfj5mo

It’s high time that you knew the tragic story of Lee-Anna Stark, Ned’s younger sister, ol’ Bob’s high-school sweetheart, the OG Appalachian trap queen, and the hillbilly Helen of Troy. As a teenager, Lee-Anna had been the prettiest girl in Winter Holler. After graduation, everyone had assumed that she would either hit the country music charts or the pageant circuit, prettier than Dolly Parton and more down-to-earth than any Miss West Virginia there had ever been. But it was not to be. Lee-Anna had come of age during Ned and Bob’s skirmishing with the Targaryens. One night, she had disappeared from a bonfire, by all accounts last seen in the presence of Ray-Ray Targaryen, Dany’s much-older brother. Nobody could prove anything, but Ned knew where his sister had gone; it was her kidnapping that had spurred he and Bob to real action. It was only once the Targaryens were ousted from the holler and Ray-Ray had been shot in the back of the head that anybody had found Lee-Anna in a shed down-mountain with a baby boy she certainly hadn’t been pregnant with when she had disappeared almost a year before. Lee-Anna hadn’t made it, but the kid had. 

Ned Stark never told anyone, for the sake of Lee-Anna’s reputation. He had taken the baby back home and raised him alongside his own children, much to the chagrin of his young wife, who had recently given birth to her own first child. You have, of course, realized by now who this child grew up to be, but nobody else in the holler had made the connection. At least, that's how it seemed...but we'll get to that later. First, we have to check up on the Stark kids, who are coming up on some milestones.

Sansa had expected to feel proud of herself when she graduated, but all she felt was empty. Her brothers and sister waved and smiled at her from the bleachers in the gym, hooted and cheered when her name was called, but she felt detached from her body. She walked up to the front of the gym in her high-heels, paused and smiled, perfectly made up, shook the principal's hand, took her hard-won diploma, then walked back to her seat between a guy wearing a smelly camo hat with his graduation gown and a girl who was seven months pregnant. She ran her fingers over the paper, tracing her name. None of it seemed to mean anything.

There was a touching tribute to Joff just before the conclusion of the ceremony. The principal called for a moment of silence to remember the boy taken so tragically and violently before his time. He prayed that the killer, whose identity was still unknown, would be caught and brought to justice. Sansa fought the urge to roll her eyes. Nothing was different. Nothing would ever be different.

Instead of attending the many uproarious, beer-drinkin', truck-muddin', teen-impregnatin' parties that would unfold in the holler that night, Sansa decided to stay home and do her laundry. On her way to the washing machine in the basement, Sansa noticed that the door to Robb’s room was cracked for the first time since he had died. She peeked inside; Jon was sitting on the bed, staring down at a pair of Robb’s dirty shoes poking out from underneath the bed, beer in hand. Sansa nudged the door open and stood in the doorway, balancing the laundry basket on her hip. Jon looked up, indicated the room with a sweep of his head. Everything was neat, still boyish, plaid bedspread tucked carefully over the pillows, a well-worn baseball glove on the shelf above the dresser with a baseball still inside it.

“It’s weird. It’s like a museum in here.”

“Ain’t nobody touched nothin’,” Sansa confirmed, setting down the basket, entering the room, and sitting down on the floor in front of her brother. “You missin’ him?” Jon shook his head.

“It don’t even seem like he’s dead. I hadn’t seen him for so long…I hadn’t seen any of you for so long…” His mouth twisted bitterly, but Sansa had done enough wallowing in regret to allow him to do the same.

“We don’t blame you none. I know you and mama didn’t get along. ‘Sides…who would come back here if they didn’t have to?” Her laugh was small, hollow, and unconvincing. 

“I wanna move us all out of here, Sansa. Someplace where I can get a job. So we ain’t strugglin’ anymore. It don’t feel right here.” He scowled down at the empty shoes between his own socked feet. Sansa didn't say anything. She couldn't say it felt right to her, either. Nothing was in its place. Sometimes she still caught the ghost of Cat's long skirt drifting around a corner, or smelled her father's Old Spice, and experienced a moment of dizzying incertitude that was hard to shake. It seemed like they were all living in a refugee camp instead of a home. She itched to escape, but the person who would have picked her up and taken her away in a heartbeat was gone. Without her. She was beginning to have misgivings about the decision she had made to stay in Winter Holler.

“I ain’t slept in days,” Jon confessed suddenly. “I thought it might be easier to sleep in here…me and Robb used to have these sleepovers...but it ain’t any easier.” Sansa scooted across the floor and put her hand on his knee. She looked at him with a firm sort of concern, the sort that meant that she would not and could not be brushed away.

“What’s wrong, Jon?” He shrugged. He drained his beer. The response was clearly already on his tongue, but he wrestled with it anyway; it seemed to burn on the way out.

“I watched my friends die for no good reason. No good reason that I can think of, anyway.”

Now, you'll notice that the title of this chapter is "Dumb Ways to Die." _Dumb_ is a word which can (and does) mean _stupid,_ but in our context, it can also mean _senseless, purposeless, or unnecessary._ Dying in a freak sandcastle accident is, for example, purposeless. A bunch of young men and women being blown up by roadside bombs in the middle of fighting a war that they don't even understand is senseless. Veterans offing themselves because nobody warned them about how sneaky PTSD can be is unnecessary.

Later that night, Sansa awoke to an enormous cracking sound, followed by a heavy thud. Arya vaulted to a sitting position in bed; she turned wide, round owl-eyes on Sansa, who was already hustling out of bed and across the hall to the master bedroom, where the noise had originated. The bedroom was dark, the bed mussed but abandoned; the only light came from the small attached bathroom. There, Jon was on the bathroom floor, slightly blue in the face, gasping for breath. There was an extension cord noose around his neck, which was tied to the shower rod, which had broken off of the wall and was lying on the floor in a pile of plaster, drywall, and crumpled shower curtain. Ygritte was standing over him in a huge, billowing t-shirt that read _WILD WILLIE'S SPICIEST WINGS NORTH OF THE MASON-DIXON._ Her white skin was heating up in red blotches as if she had been running for too long.

"You must be pretty fucking wasted if you thought that fucking thing was gonna hold your weight," she said through tightly gritted teeth. Sansa didn’t know what to say, and she didn't think she would ever know what to say, so she just turned around, walked out, and went back to her room. She felt a crushing disappointment, a sense of betrayal. Nobody could be trusted to provide for them. Nobody could reliably bear this climate of impossible strain except, it seemed, for her.

“What happened?” Arya asked. Sansa shook her head.

“Jon just tripped in the dark. Go back to sleep.”

*

There are two young people we haven't met yet: Joff's younger siblings, Myrcella and Tommy. Myrcella was a teenage girl in the painfully typical, Barbie-esque sense of the word. She was pretty, blonde, and not very smart, and furthermore, she had recently run away with her high-school sweetheart to get married in Tennessee. We're more concerned with young Tommy. He was only younger than Joff by a few years, but he was a very different person than his brother had been. A scrawny high-school freshman with few friends whose favorite activity was raising bunnies for 4H, he was an unlikely heir for Bob’s end of the drug empire. Nevertheless, the Lannisters were running out of options. They had few friends left. They had to produce and condition a successor if any of them wanted to retire from the drug business before they were eighty. 

Ty called his last remaining nephew out to the front steps, where he was sitting with a six-pack, watching the road, where nothing was moving but the weeds in the sultry evening wind. The crickets and the cicadas were just beginning to screech as the sun set behind a distant mountain.

“Have a beer, Tommy,” he said tersely, nodding to the cans.

“Mama says that drinkin’ll kill ya,” Tommy said nervously, but he sat down beside his uncle. Ty cracked a beer and handed it to the kid without looking at him.

“Your brother is dead, and your sister’s runned off with God-knows-who to do God-knows-what. You’re your mama’s last child, and you know what that means?”

“No, what?” Tommy's voice broke with the tell-tale crack of someone who was still in the thick of puberty. Ty grimaced.

“Grandpa Lannister is gonna try to make you into a motherfuckin’ killer, boy.” Tommy paled, gulped down a watery mouthful of the beer.

“I ain’t no killer.”

“I know that. You’re a good kid, Tommy. That's why I want you to take this.” He pressed a large wad of money into Tommy's hand and folded the boy's fingers around it. "This is for when things go real bad." Tommy was really panicking now. He took another nervous gulp from the can and wiped his hair back from his sweaty forehead.

"What should I spend it on?" he asked quietly.

"Gas," Ty replied succinctly. 

"Where'd you get all this money, Uncle Ty?"

"None of your damn business, boy. Now finish your beer." They sat in silence as dusk fell. Ty was staring so hard at the weeds in the road that Tommy half-expected them to catch on fire. He didn't even look up when Tommy leaned over and vomited loudly into the little patch of purple impatiens that his mother had planted beside the steps.

It was only a few days later that Tommy ran into Maggie at the tent revival. He had come alone, as had she, both of their families being sick and tired of their respective Bible-thumping. Of course, the two had already met while Maggie was dating Joff, however short-lived their courtship had been. She was a lot older than him, but she was really nice, which stopped him from stuttering quite as much as he usually did when speaking to females. They sat together in the bleachers and listened to the preacher expound on his Seven Steps to Heaven program. There was no speaking in tongues, snake-handling, or faith-healing in this program; instead, the soft-spoken man asked the people of the holler to embrace their poverty as a gift from God, and to do what they could within their means to improve their community. There was, however, a strong threat of hell. Tommy couldn't even keep the list of all the hell-worthy sins straight. It was dizzying. He was definitely going to be chucked right into the lake of fire when he died, by his own estimation, and that was what made it easier when, after the sermon, Maggie asked him if he had any money so that they could go buy some Adderall and snort it behind the high-school. After all, his grandpa was going to try to make him into a killer, and he was going to hell anyway...

Within the hour, all of Ty's emergency money was gone.

*

Let's talk about Jaime Lannister's right hand. He had done a lot of things with that hand: thrown a football, tickled his children, wrote down memos for his father, done some minor carpentry, pleasured a few females, pleasured himself, scratched his ass, operated a forklift that one summer...innumerable things. He thought he had a pretty good relationship with his right hand. There was no reason to suspect that it would suddenly and without warning depart from his body, but depart from his body it did.

Sissy's insistence that he get out and make money hung heavy over Jaime's head. The Stark family was still making the bulk of the methamphetamine money in Winter Holler despite the fact that most of them were dead. They still had customer loyalty and brand recognition, and those dealers who had sold from them for years went on selling from them even though they had no orders from above. An unknown cook was flooding the market with product that the Lannisters hadn’t made and money they weren’t seeing. The Starks and their hangers-on were sucking up most of that profit. To compound that, there was a tent revival in town harping on some “just-say-no" bullshit, and that had caused some citizens in the holler to try to do some daft things like "cleaning up the community" and "making it safe for children." The fuckers.

As previously mentioned, the Lannisters had few friends left. There was certainly nobody who was going to cook for them. That was what led Jaime, former football star and father of three, to the cookhouse. How hard could it be? If a wack-job like Bolton could do it, then so could he. Let's make a long story short, here. Neither Theon, Dany, nor Ty had known what chemical did the exploding, but that day, Jaime had found out. When the dust settled, his garage had a huge hole blown in one side and he had one less hand.

*

Mellie was at the farm house bright and early for Bible study. She and Jon sat in the kitchen, discussing The Gospel of Luke, his voice hoarse from all the extension-cord-choking, hers light and calm. Sansa took her breakfast to her room. She didn't want to look at either of them. Halfway through stirring her Lucky Charms around without eating any of them, Jon tapped on the half-open door and stuck his head in.

"I'm gonna take Mellie home. You wanna come?"

"Yeah. Sure." _Just to keep you from doin' anythin' else fuckin' stupid._ They took Cat's van, so Sansa had to sit in the back. Mellie lived on the other side of the town center, in a quaint little mobile home that Stan had probably bought for her before he had lost his mind. There were floral curtains in the window and fake flamingos stuck in the overgrown yard. Mellie got out with her Bible in hand, calling over her shoulder that she would be back next week to talk about Leviticus. Before Jon could pull away, a face appeared at the open window, the familiar face of Twitchy Dave.

Twitchy Dave had been Stan’s best friend once, but he also seemed to have a sixth sense that told him when things were about to go horribly wrong. He had managed to dip out before the whole “fratricide-n-filicide” fiasco and had only showed back up in town after Stan was good and dead. Without any living friend or relative, he could be found most days in the parking lot of the Family Dollar leaning up against his car and drinking, staring off into some terrible distance, grimacing, but today his car was parked outside the row of trailers. It almost seemed as if he had been waiting for them.

“Don’t bring Mellie ‘round them kids, Jon,” the grizzled old man said grimly. “She’s poison.” And just like that, he was gone.

“What the hell’s he talkin’ about?” Jon asked, looking in the rear-view mirror at Sansa. She clambered over the seat and into the front, and buckled herself into the passenger seat. She stared forward grimly, nodding at the road to signify that he should drive.

“Jon…there’s a lot I ain’t told you. ‘Bout the way things been since pa died.” And then Sansa spilled it all, beginning to end, without sparing one single gritty detail.

*

Theon was leaning out of the back door of his shop, watching a pickup as it backed up into the scant space between the building the dumpster. It was his weekly drop, the guy who would sell him the ice that he would hide in the store's back room in an ancient, otherwise unused desk. It sure went faster than any of his other products. He was pretty sure his pa had last stocked the Twinkies back in '94, which had remained perfectly untouched to this day.

“Jesus Christ, you better stop before you take out the store,” Theon hollered. The driver of the rusted-out Ford slammed on the brakes and hopped out of the cab. As the money changed hands, Theon tried to make conversation; he tried to make conversation every time, but the meth-drop guy never said a word.

“Who’s cookin’ now?” he asked. Predictably, the guy just shrugged, stuffed the money in his pocket, and hightailed it out of there. Theon took his shit to the back room and stuffed the baggies of crystal into the drawers of the desk, then locked it up tight. The back room of the shop was filthy and depressing. The desk was stacked with old ledgers, meticulously filled out in his father's hand. Ugly and uncomfortable metal stools of varying heights were placed at random around the room. It appeared that Balon had used this place for storage; there were boxes stacked in one corner, baby things, maybe, or Christmas decorations. Everything was simultaneously dusty and sticky. There was no light; the only illumination came from one cracked window pane above the desk. 

Theon didn't even hear the door open—he must have left it ajar behind him—but suddenly, just as he was locking the last drawer, someone was at his back, a big hand clamped over his mouth. Theon’s eyes widened momentarily, and his muscles seized up, before he smelled something familiar—a musky combination of cigarette smoke and wet dog—and knew exactly who it was. When the hand released his face, Theon rolled his eyes.

“How was prison?” he asked.

“Buncha skinhead pricks doin’ push-ups and talkin’ ‘bout pussy all day,” Ramsay replied, his lips right under Theon’s ear, letting his hands drop to Theon’s hips.

“Right up your alley, then.”

“I told ‘em that I had the sweetest piece of ass waitin’ for me back home.” A hand felt its way down to his ass and squeezed playfully. “All them Nazi bastards were jealous.”

“I bet they were.”

“You miss me?”

 _Yes._ “Fuck off.” He turned his head away.

“What you been up to?”

“Cleanin’ up your messes. Takin’ care of your dogs. Dealin’ with my sister.” Theon was doing his best to sound put-out and imposed-upon, but in truth, the only thing that had kept him normal was the routine of the dogs and Yara's strict expectations. He had long since been in no condition to take care of himself, and on some level, he knew it.

“Don’t you worry ‘bout your bitch sister. We can go on up to the trailer and do whatever the fuck we want.” Theon hesitated. Yara would kill him. He was clean-ish. The strongest thing he’d had all month was beer. He was starting to look better, he was starting to feel better…but then he remembered the helpless sadness of sleeping in his bed alone. He remembered how it had all felt before the inevitable crash, the initial rush of euphoria, the hours of exhaustion-free fucking, the painless closeness both to himself and anther human being...he licked his dry lips. 

“Go out front and turn that sign around.”

*

The trailer smelled like old food and dried blood. They had smoked up in the truck, so both of them were already good and fucked when they stumbled through the door. Neither man spared a glance for the tiny kitchen sink piled with moldy dishes, or the mouse droppings that had collected under the furniture, or the half-cleaned rifle that Roose had left on he carpet in the living room the day he had finally gotten himself killed. They went straight for the master bedroom. Ramsay threw Theon down on the cheap bed; it cracked as if it were about to break. Theon laughed soundlessly as he bounced on the shitty mattress, the wind knocked out of him. He was in the middle of clambering out of of his pants when his heart started doing things that hearts weren’t supposed to do, and it wasn’t because he was feeling the romance. White spots appeared in front of his eyes, and suddenly, he was flat on his back, breathless all over again.

“Theon?” Ramsay’s voice sounded like it was coming from far away, underwater. Theon was experiencing a very trippy sensation of floating like a balloon out of his body while at the same time, he was being compressed like an atom in a splicer or various different types of meat-scrap being condensed into bologna. Slowly, syrupy black began to close over his vision, eclipsing the man who was leaning over him, shaking him, slapping his numb face. All of a sudden he was pretty pissed off that Ramsay Bolton, fresh out of prison and tweaked off his ass, was the last person he was going to see. Overdosing, after all, is a very dumb way to die. Moments or hours later, Theon opened his eyes again. Ramsay was on his knees, pounding on Theon’s chest, swearing and sweating.

“What happened?” he asked, his speech slurred. He felt heavy and dizzy. His limbs buzzed, and his face and neck were wet. He realized with a dumb sort of self-hatred that he had puked on himself.

“Jesus Christ. You scared the shit out of me," Ramsay gasped, climbing off of Theon now that his violent chest compressions were no longer necessary. "I think you had a seizure. How much did you smoke?”

“Less than usual. Fuck.” Theon found himself wishing he had gone ahead and died. He felt like he had been turned instead out and worn as a coat. Ramsay retrieved the plastic baggie of crystal from the car and sat on the bed beside his sprawled companion, turning it over in his hands as if he could learn its secrets that way.

“Well, fuck me sideways," he muttered to himself. “Who made this shit?”

*

It was near midnight when Theon tiptoed into the house, holding his shoes, still woozy and unwell. Despite the creaking of the old house and his constant bumping into walls, he thought he was going to make it to his room unscathed. No such luck. As soon as his big toe hit the upstairs landing, Yara flung her bedroom door open and stood in the doorway accusingly, her arms folded. She was wearing a pair of athletic shorts and a sports bra, because of course she was, because she had probably been doing a fun evening set of wall-sits and burpees in there before bed.

“I heard from a couple of boys down at the bar that Bolton got sprung,” she said coldly. “That where you been all day and half the night? I called my higher-ups today. I ain’t leavin’ until I know you’re gonna make it through the fuckin’ summer, Theon.”

"You ain't my mother," he muttered, refusing to look at her.

"Well then stop actin' like a fuckin' child." Theon rolled his eyes. He hadn't come back from the dead to listen to her bitch all night.

“You wanna pretend you didn’t grow up around here, Yara? You wanna pretend you're better than everyone else? Do it on your own time.” Theon staggered down the hall and slammed his door. Yara followed suit.

“Fuck. That little shit.” She did not like it when things spiraled out of her control. It meant that she had planned incorrectly or not enough. There was already plenty of her family that she couldn't save: her two oldest brothers, gunned down in a drug deal gone bad when she had been too young to do anything about it, and the mother who hadn't made it through the year after. Her father who had gone off the rails and disappeared. Theon was the only person whose fate she could influence, and she wasn't doing a great job steering him.

Dany stuffed a handful of potato chips into her mouth. She was reclining on the bed in a tank top and her underwear, and beside her was a family-sized bag of Lays Originals. It was a mystery how Dany stayed so thin when she constantly had the munchies.

“It ain’t all that easy to quit a habit like that," she said calmly. "Imagine that you had to give up…I dunno, push-ups.”

“Push-ups are good for you,” Yara grumbled, shooting Dany a withering look and sitting down on the edge of the bed, her back hunched, defeated.

"Not the way you do 'em. Let me tell you somethin’, alright? I was in foster care my whole childhood,” Dany said. She paused to shove more chips in her mouth and chew. “With my brother. They did everythin’ they could to keep us two together, bless their hearts, not knowin’ that it was him who was fuckin’ around with me, not my foster parents. And I was too scared or too dumb to say nothin’. I ran away from that. You ran away, too. The fact that I hit the road with a biker gang and you joined the Navy don't make it a different fuckin' concept. You gotta deal with the past. Or it's gonna eat you the fuck up until you ain't nothin'." She punctuated this wisdom with an enormous burp.

"You're right. I know you're right. I just think smokin' ice is a little more serious fuckin' copin' mechanism."

"At least he's tryin'," Dany shrugged. She tossed the empty Lays bag on the floor, brushed some crumbs off her shirt, and crawled across the bed to where Yara sat. Cat-like as always, she wriggled her upper body onto the other woman's lap, smiling winsomely up at her. "I really like you, you know that, Yara Greyjoy?"

"You're stoned, is what you are," Yara replied with a smile, running her square fingers through Dany's peroxide-bleached split-ends.

"No, I ain't. Not stoned enough to not be truthful. I really like you, and because I really like you, there’s somethin’ else I gotta tell you.” Dany took a deep breath, then let the cat out of the bag. "Don't be mad, but I been cookin' meth with Ty Lannister." Yara stared down at her in disbelief for a moment, then raised her eyes to the heaven that obviously did not care about her sanity. 

"Oh, for Christ's sake," she hissed out in one thin breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a side note, I know I’m not doing Arya any justice, but it’s a little difficult to come up with a modern hillbilly equivalent of “young girl goes on magical murder quest by herself and nobody really notices she’s gone.”


End file.
